Probably most of us, if not all of us, have heard the catchphrase,

A dingo ate my baby, or some slight variation of that.

Australians all know where it comes from, but many of the rest of us don't, except that we've

heard it in some comical context, perhaps on Seinfeld or The Simpsons.

Today, we're going to look at exactly where it comes from, and whether it truly belongs in comedy writing, and if it doesn't, how did it get there?

That's coming up right now on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. A dingo ate my baby.

Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing

what's real and what's not. In 1980, an incident took place, which, over the decades,

would come to be regarded as Australia's most infamous case of miscarried justice. Simultaneously,

and very oddly, it introduced a comedic phrase into the pop culture

lexicon. This bizarre juxtaposition of tragedy and comedy casts an eerie light over this famous story,

which many people outside Australia might not know anything about. A young couple, Lindy and Michael Chamberlain, was camping at the famous Uluru, then called Ayers Rock, in the middle of Australia.

One night, other campers heard Lindy shout something like,

A Dingo ate my baby, or a dingo took my baby, and it became clear that their two-month-old baby daughter,

Azaria, was missing. Police were summoned, but tiny Azaria was never found, and comedians

had a new catchphrase. Why? I have a long-standing policy of not doing episodes that exploit tragic deaths.

There's a little point anyway.

It's not like I'm going to do one week of documentary research and uncover some truth that the police missed for decades.

It's not like I'm Michelle McNamara or anything.

I'm making a slight exception in this case, because we're not here to talk about

the death, but about a popular phrase and how it ended up as a familiar one in pop culture. But more than that,

...