The devil made me do it.

“The devil made me do it” is Flip Wilson’s signature catchphrase from his Geraldine Jones character on NBC’s variety program The Flip Wilson Show (1970–1974). Geraldine—self-styled as “the devil’s daughter”—used the line as a comic excuse for misbehavior, turning moral blame into a punchline. The phrase became a widely recognized piece of early-1970s American pop culture, repeated beyond the show in stand-up, everyday speech, and later media as shorthand for humorous deflection of responsibility. Wilson’s use of the line helped cement Geraldine as one of television’s most memorable recurring characters of the era.

The humor of the line lies in its mock-serious appeal to supernatural causation as an alibi. By attributing ordinary temptations and bad choices to “the devil,” the speaker dodges accountability while simultaneously acknowledging that the excuse is flimsy—inviting the audience to laugh at the self-justification. In Wilson’s Geraldine sketches, the phrase also satirizes moralizing rhetoric: it reduces complex questions of agency, desire, and social propriety to a single, theatrical scapegoat. Its staying power comes from its flexibility: it can be deployed playfully to soften confession, signal irony, or critique the tendency to externalize blame.

“The devil made me do it!”
“The devil made me buy this dress.”
“The devil made me say it.”