Said the actress to the bishop

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"Said the actress to the bishop", or "as the actress said to the bishop" is an informal (and occasionally vulgar) exclamation, usually said for humour after an inadvertent use of a double entendre.

It is said in the style of a punchline, comically implying the original double entendre was merely the second-from-last line in a long, rude joke.

Examples could be:

 Person A: "I've got a long one here somewhere."
 Person B: "...said the actress to the bishop!"

 Person A: "It doesn't usually leak this much."
 Person B: "...as the actress said to the bishop!"

 Person A: "well, I just came across that one..."
 Person B: "as the actor said... to the bishop..."

On occasion, the term is swapped when appropriate to "said the bishop to the actress", or "as the bishop said to the actress".

The phrase is an example of a Wellerism, a literal "turn" of a phrase, changing its meaning.

Whether an original joke existed involving an actress and a bishop is not known.

[edit] History and Background

The term may have been used as far back as Edwardian times, but is rarely used in the USA, deriving from British use. One poster on the Phrases.org.uk website[1] claimed that the phrase was "Certainly in RAF use c. 1944-7, but probably going back to Edwardian days; only very slightly obsolete by 1975, it is likely to outlive most of us".

The phrase is frequently used (in various contexts) by the fictional character Simon Templar (alias "The Saint") in a long-running series of mystery books by Leslie Charteris. The phrase first appears in the inaugural Saint novel Meet - The Tiger! which was published in 1928.

The phrase was also used in Ricky Gervais' comedy The Office: "This is Karen Roper, my new secretary. You can all use her - oh, as an actress said to a bishop."

The closest American approximation of this phrase is "That's what she said," popularized by the Wayne's World sketch on Saturday Night Live. The phrase is also used in the American version of The Office, where the exclamation is used several times.