Oh I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener.

The line is best known as the opening of the Oscar Mayer advertising jingle “My Bologna,” a mid-20th-century American TV/radio commercial song aimed at children and families. It circulated widely through repeated broadcast, schoolyard singing, and later nostalgia media, becoming a piece of pop-cultural vernacular rather than a literary quotation with a single attributable speaker. Although often repeated as a standalone “quote” and sometimes labeled “Anonymous,” it originates in commercial copy/songwriting tied to the Oscar Mayer brand and its hot dogs and bologna products.

Taken literally, the line is absurd—wanting to be a hot dog—yet that absurdity is the point: it’s a childlike fantasy that equates brand identity with popularity and affection. As advertising rhetoric, it compresses a persuasive message into a memorable, humorous wish: the product is so desirable that becoming it would confer social value. Quoted outside its jingle, it can read as a satire of consumer culture, where recognition and love are imagined as outcomes of association with a famous name. Its enduring afterlife as a catchphrase shows how commercial language can enter everyday speech as shared cultural memory.

1) “Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener.”
2) “Oh, I wish I was an Oscar Mayer wiener.”
3) “Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer weiner.”