cops/donuts meme

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 5/13/07, Sam Clements <SClements at neo.rr.com> wrote:
>
> Can anyone cite a historic reference to when the police started to be =
> associated with donuts?  Is this an invention of the 1960's?

That may be, but my sense is that the donut-eating stereotype didn't
reach critical mass in pop culture until the '80s -- perhaps first
catching on in California. Looking for musical references, I find that
the San Francisco punk group Pop-O-Pies had a 1983 song called
"Fascists Eat Donuts" ("Make those donuts with extra grease, This
batch is for the chief of police"). Another Bay Area punk band, NOFX,
released a song in 1985 called "Cops and Donuts," with lyrics about
getting pulled over on the freeway and avoiding arrest by feeding the
cop donuts ("Cops love donuts"). A bit more benignly, the L.A. group
The Bangles sang, "If you want to find all the cops, They're hanging
out in the donut shop" in their 1986 hit, "Walk Like an Egyptian."

On IMDb one can find cop-donut jokes in movies from about 1987
onwards. "Raising Arizona" (1987) has the line, "You want to find an
outlaw, hire an outlaw. You want to find a Dunkin' Donuts, call a
cop." "Stakeout" (1987) and "Die Hard" (1988) also support the notion
that cops subsist on a donut diet.


--Ben Zimmer

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