The Best Caddyshack Quotes of All Time
Caddyshack has been quoted at golf courses for 45 years and the supply has not run low. Almost every scene produces something worth repeating — a credit to the film's cast of improvisers who were given the freedom to find lines that a conventional script would never have generated. Here are the best, organized by character.
Carl Spackler (Bill Murray)
Murray arrived on the Caddyshack set with almost no scripted material and proceeded to improvise some of the most memorable lines in the film. His delivery is unhurried, sincere, and completely unaware of itself — the perfect register for a man who takes his war against a gopher with absolute seriousness.
"Cinderella story. Outta nowhere. A former greenskeeper, now, about to become the Masters champion. It looks like a mirac... It's in the hole! It's in the hole!"
"License to kill gophers by the government of the United Nations. Man, free to kill gophers at will. To kill, you must know your enemy, and in this case my enemy is a varmint."
"So I jump ship in Hong Kong and make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over in the Himalayas. A looper, you know, a caddie, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I'm a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama himself."
Ty Webb (Chevy Chase)
Chevy Chase plays Ty with the air of a man who has transcended competitive golf and is now simply playing it for aesthetic reasons. His lines are philosophical, vaguely profound, and possibly meaningless — you can never quite tell and that ambiguity is the whole joke.
"Be the ball, Danny. Be the ball."
"You take drugs, Danny?" / "Every day." / "Good. So what's the problem?"
"I was born to love you. I was born to lick your face. I was born to rub you, but you were born to rub me first."
"A flute without holes is not a flute. A donut without a hole is a Danish."
Judge Elihu Smails (Ted Knight)
Ted Knight plays the pompous club president with total commitment to the bit — a man who has constructed his entire identity on hierarchy, and who becomes progressively undone when that hierarchy refuses to behave. His line readings are too precise to be improvisations; Knight was doing what he always did, which was play it exactly right.
"I've sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber. Didn't want to do it — felt I owed it to them."
"You'll get nothing, and like it."
"Don't you people have homes?"
"Well, we're waiting."
Al Czervik (Rodney Dangerfield)
Dangerfield essentially performed his stand-up act in a Bushwood Country Club setting. Very little of his material is scripted — it's his nightclub persona translated into a character, and it works perfectly because the straight-faced pretension of the club is exactly the right target for his particular brand of comedy.
"Oh, this your wife, huh? A lovely lady. Hey baby, you must've been something before electricity."
"I hear this place is restricted, Wang, so don't tell 'em you're Jewish."
"Last time I saw a mouth like that, it had a hook in it."
The Lines People Forget Are Great
Beyond the most quoted material, Caddyshack contains dozens of lines that don't get recited but land perfectly in context. Spaulding's extended food order. Lou Loomis's perpetual exasperation. Danny's attempts to navigate the Smails family. The film rewards rewatching specifically because the second- and third-tier material improves with familiarity.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the most famous Caddyshack quote?
"Be the ball" and "Cinderella story, out of nowhere" are the most widely repeated Caddyshack lines, but "You'll get nothing and like it" and "I was born to love you, I was born to lick your face" have equally passionate followings.
Who improvised the most in Caddyshack?
Bill Murray improvised the majority of his scenes, including the Cinderella speech, the Dalai Lama speech, and the gopher-hunting sequences. Rodney Dangerfield also largely performed his own material. Chevy Chase worked from a loose framework of character rather than scripted lines.