Michael Harris’s Top 20 Alliterations

Image from Sitcoms Online

This article was originally posted on my website on 3/19/23.

Bob Newhart’s third of four shows bearing all or part of his name, Newhart, started out OK, but didn’t really pick up until season three. One of the main reasons for the vast improvement was the addition of Michael Harris, the slick-talking TV producer played by the late great Peter Scolari.

I’m a big fan of Michael because not only does he share my soft spot for silly sitcoms, but he also has a wonderful way with words, a high regard for rhyming, and a latent love of alliterations. I too have a tendency to transcribe twin syllables in my tomes, often without even realizing I’m doing it. To pay proper tribute to my peer in poetic prose, I painstakingly pored over every part of the program to present to you Michael Harris’s top 20 alliterations.

1. Did my designer lenses deceive me or were your dainty digits actually burrowing that beefcake’s biceps?

2. Would you quirky crossbred country kinsmen consider mangling your monikers for a mansion on the mount?

3. How else can I capture the slapping of our sapling’s posterior for posterity, Pookie?

4. But this one is unique because it would be starring one of the most exciting personalities to ever push a painting of poker-playing pooches.

5. He’s gonna get his head bashed in by some bozo Bluto over a bow-wow?

6. Two weeks ago I was a babbling blankoid with a berth in the bughouse.

7. A pithy packet of prose, but where’s the parallel?

8. Looks like he took my verbal venom verbatim.

9. Pardon, but perhaps you can persuade those pentameter-pushers to postpone?

10. Query: can you have a case if you can’t conjure up a corpse?

11. Well, she can pucker ’til she’s tuckered, but you’ll never be kicked out of the cockles of their corazones.

12. She’s a tad tardy. Maybe there’s a traffic tie-up.

13. You were bullied by a band of barnacled barbarians?

14. Let’s take a pregnant pause and peruse the positives.

15. You could’ve sown the seed that sired me, Sir.

16. My babe-in-arms goes goo-goo for the guests but poo-poos her own papa.

17. If you dry your ducts, Darling, Daddy’ll buy you a Bill Blass baby blankie.

18. Like a pretty little piece of post-op pastry.

19. This paisan’s primed for pasta.

20. Could my cuppers be correct? Is it wrong to nurture my niblet with nature?

Honorable Mentions

Occasionally, Michael rubbed off on some of the other characters, like in the first honorable mention, when Paul, another producer at the TV station, spoke the following amazing alliteration. Of course, Michael responded in kind.

PAUL: With us behind you, we can send that pushy pest packing and have her pounding the pavement by the PM.

MICHAEL: Perfectly put, Paul, but practical?

The following two honorable mentions are not alliterations but rhymes; however, they were just too good to leave out.

1. Dick, you’ve already got one foot off the ledge. If the boys allege to have a hedge that’ll give you an edge, I’d like to hear it.

2. I’ll have your spouse and her blouse in the house by eleven.