"All seriousness aside"

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:55 PM -0400 8/3/05, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>"All seriousness aside" apparently started out as a comedian's line-- I
>see it credited to Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis, and Steve Allen, so it
>probably goes back to the vaudeville era. (The Southern comedian Brother
>Dave Gardner even recorded an album called "All Seriousness Aside" in
>1963.) As I understand it, the expression often functioned as something of
>an ironic metajoke, signaling to the audience that the impending shift to
>an ostensibly more serious tone shouldn't be taken very seriously.
>
There's also "Seriously, though", another comedian's stock line.

L