The phrase "Said the actress to the bishop" is an informal (and usually vulgar) British exclamation, offering humour by serving as a punch line that exposes an unintended double entendre. An equivalent phrase in North America is "that's what she said". Each phrase is an example of a Wellerism, exposing a second meaning of what precedes it. The versatility of such phrases, and their popularity, lead some to consider them clichéd.
History and variations
The term, or its variant "as the actress said to the bishop", may have been used as far back as Edwardian times, and is apparently British in origin.
The phrase is frequently used by the fictional character Simon Templar (alias "The Saint") in a long-running series of mystery books by Leslie Charteris. The phrase first appears in the inaugural Saint novel Meet the Tiger, published in 1928.
The version "as the girl said to the soldier" appears in a recorded sound test for Alfred Hitchcock's 1929 film Blackmail.
Kingsley Amis uses the line in his 1954 novel Lucky Jim, where a woman offering relationship advice to Jim Dixon says "I can't show you, as the actress said to the bishop."
By 1973, "that's what she said" had already been characterized as an "ancient one-liner". In the early 1990s, it was popularized as a recurring joke in the Saturday Night Live sketch "Wayne's World". In the movie of the same name, the character, Wayne Campbell, uses the phrase after his partner Garth says, "Hey, are you through yet? 'Cause I'm getting tired of holding this", in regard to a picture he is holding. An 1896 recording by Len Spencer of the song "All Coons Look Alike to Me" includes the suggestive line "That's what she said, yeah."
In the original BBC version of The Office, Ricky Gervais's character David Brent frequently used the phrase "as the actress said to the bishop" as an inappropriate joke. When the show was adapted for American audiences, the phrase was translated to "that's what she said" for Steve Carell's character Michael Scott. "That's what she said" became a catchphrase of The Office and was used for the show's "That's What She Said" Sweepstakes.
The title character on the US TV show Archer, after several seasons of using "phrasing!" to draw attention to double entendres, briefly toyed with "...said Ripley to the android Bishop", a reference to both this phrase and the 1986 film Aliens.