Laurel and Hardy: "Another fine" or "Another nice" mess?
- Sue Verlander
Alternate:
Another fine mess
Current:
Another nice mess
Stan and Ollie are in a right old pickle again
Ask anyone unfamiliar with this Mandela Effect to quote Ollie's most famous catchphrase, and they'll probably respond with "Another Fine Mess".
In fact that's not what he said most of the time - it's actually "Another Nice Mess".
This MMDE is a little bit different though because of a huge clue suggesting both could be right. There was a film starring Laurel and Hardy actually called "Another Fine Mess". However, even there the "fine" version is said very rarely compared to the "nice" one.
This could be one which is somewhere between a "Beam Me Up Scotty" meme and an actual MMDE. There's clearly real evidence for both the minority and the majority memories, but it's the latter which is prevailing.
Confusion
As if the "fine"/"nice" confusion wasn't bad enough, others are reporting they are experiencing another Mandela Effect with the same phrase. This time it's whether it was another fine/nice mess you've gotten "us" or "me" into. And the best part? People are reporting all combinations of these as flip-flops. There's no doubt there were many variations, so for example Ollie might say "Well, here's another..." sometimes, and "This is another..." but that's only to be expected with regular speech anyway, and isn't part of the issue here.
There's some residue of the lesser-remembered way, for example Another Fine Myth, a novel by Robert Lynn Asprin.
The Laurel and Hardy International Appreciation society is called The Sons of the Desert, and their members are aware of this as a long standing historical quirk. they say it was never a catchphrase and is known to have been said far less often than most people think. In particular, "fine" wasn't said at all in the way suggested, the closest being Ollie saying "a fine kettle of fish", which he said exactly once.