Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.

“Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” is the title and refrain of a comic duet written by Irving Berlin for the Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun (1946). In the show it is sung as a competitive back-and-forth between sharpshooter Annie Oakley and her rival (and eventual love interest) Frank Butler, dramatizing their flirtatious one-upmanship. The number became one of the score’s best-known songs and has often been excerpted or referenced independently of the musical, sometimes treated as a standalone boast. Although the musical is loosely based on real-life figures from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Berlin’s lyric is a theatrical invention tailored to the characters’ rivalry.

On its surface the line is a playful taunt: a claim of universal superiority that invites immediate rebuttal. In context, its humor comes from exaggeration and from the rapid alternation of claims and denials, turning competition into courtship. The lyric also captures a recognizable social dynamic—status contests in which the point is less objective truth than performance, confidence, and dominance. Because it is so compact and rhythmic, the phrase has traveled beyond the stage as a shorthand for rivalry, bravado, or “anything you can do, I can top,” often used ironically to highlight childish competitiveness or gendered sparring.

Anything you can do, I can do better.