Jaleel White Tried 'A Million Darn Catchphrases' Before Striking Gold with Steve Urkel’s Iconic 'Did I Do That?'

Ever wonder where Steve Urkel’s unforgettable catchphrase “Did I do that?” came from? Well, so have Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong and Will Friedle.

On the latest episode of their Boy Meets World re-watch podcast Pod Meets World, the three hosts were joined by Jaleel White, who played the bumbling, lovelorn nerd for nine season on Family Matters. Fishel took the opportunity to ask her fellow former child star how he came up with the distinctive, whiny cadence with which he delivered his character’s oft-repeated line.

“They tried a million darn catchphrases,” White, 48, said. “The first one that they ever tried really was Steve would just bump into inanimate objects — an end table or a lamp, knock it over and say ‘Excuse me.’ That was it.”

Related: Jaleel White Explains Why Family Matters Will Never Get a Revival, Says It 'Belongs Only in the '90s'

White also recalled the show’s writers incorporating “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up” into scripts as a potential catchphrase for the accident-prone Urkel. But the line, already ubiquitous in the late ’80s and early ’90s thanks to a commercial for medical alarm company Life Alert, never hit the way “Did I do that?” would.

“We did about three of them, and ‘Did I do that?’ just stuck,” White said, adding that the success of the catchphrase really came down to the response of Family Matters’ live studio audience.

“It’s one of those things,” he explained. “You lob them out to the audience, and, you know, back then it was completely about the immediate audience reaction. You had that live studio audience to tell you in real time what was working. There was no social media.”

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White, who recently published a memoir, Growing Up Urkel, noted that this is something he misses most about making television in the ’90s.

“There were no message boards. There were no people who hated us or disliked us and thought our show was terrible,” he told the Pod Meets World hosts. “It's like, you thought our show was terrible, you didn't watch, or maybe you were a TV critic and you bashed us. And we were kids anyway, so I'm sure they told you the same crap they told us: ‘All those critics don't know what they're talking about. Look at our ratings.’ And then that was that was the end of it.”

“Now you're an adult,” he continued. “You're like, 'No, no, no. Some of these critics gotta like your stuff if you wanna ever get to the Golden Globes.' ”

While White never earned a Golden Globe or Emmy nomination, his breakout portrayal of Urkel did snag him a 1991 Young Artist Award and three NAACP Image Awards between 1994 and 1997.

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