How I Met Your Mother has been a long fan-favorite when it comes to sitcoms, and one of the greatest reasons why it was so enjoyable was none other than Neil Patrick Harris’s Barney Stinson. A literal beloved character, he just couldn’t deliver his lines without adding some unique, extraordinary touch to it with his notable – “Wait for it” – catchphrase.
However, while this very trait sets him apart from all the other characters in the world of sitcoms, the show’s creators, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, originally had no intentions of giving him this trait. If anything, they desperately wished to avoid adding this annoying feature to Stinson until one joke changed their minds and transformed the character into one of the most iconic ones of all time.
How I Met Your Mother Creators Didn’t Want Barney to Have a Catchphrase
As fans of the saga would agree, one of the most favorable traits of Neil Patrick Harris‘s character in How I Met Your Mother is how he creatively manages to add his iconic catchphrase “wait for it” in a lot of his sentences, if not all of them. But, surprisingly enough, the creators of the show originally decided against any such traits for him.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Carter Bays confessed the same, saying:
We both felt very strongly: ‘Let’s not turn Barney into the Fonz, and let’s not make him a guy who does a bunch of catchphrases.’
Echoing his thoughts of not turning Stinson into something like Fonzie from the sitcom Happy Days was co-creator Craig Thomas, who said: “Let’s not s— on Fonzie here!”
But as much as both of them insisted on it initially, they eventually ended up changing their minds for reasons all too understandable. As Bays admitted while talking about this very decision of theirs, they “held onto that for, like, five minutes, and then that went out the window.”
The reason behind this was the fact that the character was “actually based on a friend of ours, and the idea of a catchphrase is real life because there are just some people that recycle the same thing over and over again because it works for them,” as Bays candidly continued to confess.
Obviously, for Stinson, it most certainly worked that way considering how this was the perfect “metric” he needed “by which to measure things,” or, as co-creator Bays said, “some word that describes the peak for Barney.” This led to the “best of the best” signature catchphrase “legendary” that Stinson sports one too many times in the series — but only to fans’ heartiest pleasure.
How One HIMYM Joke Changed This Decision for Barney
During the same interview, Chris Miller, who co-wrote the script of season one with Phil Lord, confessed how he transformed this one word into the iconic catchphrase that established Barney Stinson as one of the most favorite characters in the entire saga.
Chris Miller confessed:
Phil had written ‘legendary’ into a lot of the pages of the script and when I got to the one that was ‘legend — wait for it — dary,’ I added ‘legend — wait for it, and I hope you’re not lactose intolerant — dary.
Apparently, according to Miller, the partial word “dary” was simply “sitting out there all alone on an island” and needed something to go along with it as well. Thus, he added the phrase “and I hope you’re not lactose intolerant” to it, and voila! The perfect catchphrase was born.
But as perfect as this gag was just like this, Bays and Thomas decided to have the last laugh by further prolonging the phrase with a “the second half of that word is … “ before “dary.”
That was that and the rest was history, considering how that is still regarded as one of the most creative uses of his “wait for it” catchphrases by Stinson to date.
You can stream How I Met Your Mother on — wait for it — Hulu.
