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Who really said it

Me Tarzan, you Jane

Not quite — on screen it is only “Jane. Tarzan.” Ivor Novello 1893–1951 · Welsh composer and actor; credited with the dialogue for Tarzan the Ape Man (1932)
Disputed In copyright

In Tarzan the Ape Man (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1932) Tarzan’s side of the famous exchange is nothing but the two proper nouns: Jane offers “I’m Jane Parker. Understand? Jane,” then points at him — “And you? You?” — and Tarzan answers by pointing at her and at himself — “Jane. Tarzan. Jane. Tarzan…” — faster and faster. The pidgin sentence “Me Tarzan, you Jane” is nowhere in the picture; the earliest printing of it we could find is Johnny Weissmuller’s own joke to Photoplay in June 1932, two months after the film opened.

Last verified 27 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“Me Tarzan, you Jane” is not in Tarzan the Ape Man (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1932). On screen the exchange is only the two names, with pointing: "Jane. Tarzan. Jane. Tarzan…" The screen dialogue was credited to Ivor Novello (1893–1951), over Cyril Hume's adaptation. The catchphrase came from Johnny Weissmuller himself, in Photoplay for June 1932: "You see, I'm no actor. Well, I didn't have to act in 'Tarzan, the Ape Man' — just said, 'Me Tarzan, you Jane.'" — Quotle.info · Verbatim: “Jane. Tarzan. Jane. Tarzan. Jane. Tarzan.”

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Loew’s, Inc.)). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Ivor Novello — Welsh composer, actor and dramatist; dialogue credit on Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). Theme: "Me Tarzan, you Jane". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Me Tarzan, you Jane". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The scene, as actually written

Film
Tarzan the Ape Man
Released
2 April 1932 · Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, directed by W. S. Van Dyke
Written by
Cyril Hume (adaptation) and Ivor Novello (dialogue), from characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Spoken by
Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) and Jane Parker (Maureen O’Sullivan) — fictional characters

Jane: I’m Jane Parker. Understand? Jane. [pointing to herself] Jane.
Tarzan [touching her]: Jane.
Jane [pointing to Tarzan]: And you? You?
Tarzan [touching his chest]: Tarzan. Tarzan.
Jane: Tarzan.
Tarzan: Jane. Tarzan. Jane. Tarzan. Jane. Tarzan. Jane. Tarzan. Jane… the name-exchange scene

Assembled from three independent published transcriptions that agree on both the wording and the pointing — Ross Petras’s Stupid Movie Lines ↗, Diane Giddis’s The Movie Dialogue Quiz Book and Paul Kirchner’s Everything You Know Is Wrong, all searchable in full text through the Internet Archive. Jane’s intervening cue — “And you? You?” — is restored from the fuller transcription in Wikipedia’s List of film misquotes ↗, cited there to The New York Times; none of the three books prints it. No transcription contains the sentence “Me Tarzan, you Jane” — Tarzan’s own lines are nothing but the two names.

Magazine scan
Photoplay, June 1932 — Weissmuller coins the phrase
AFI Catalog record for Tarzan the Ape Man (1932)

How we verified this

  • Wikiquote’s page for Tarzan the Ape Man (1932 film) ↗ transcribes two dialogue passages from the picture. Neither is the line everybody quotes — and neither is even the name-exchange scene, which Wikiquote does not print at all.
  • The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, quoted in a footnote to Wikipedia’s Ivor Novello ↗ article, says Novello “reputedly originated the line that gave rise to the now mythical if inaccurate ‘Me Tarzan. You Jane’ (originally – with appropriate pointing – ‘Tarzan. Jane.’)”. Note the ODNB’s own hedge: reputedly.
  • Three separate transcriptions of the scene agree. Ross Petras’s Stupid Movie Lines ↗ prints Jane’s cue and Tarzan’s reply as the two names alternating; Diane Giddis and Paul Kirchner print the same run of names, Giddis adding the stage direction “pointing to her and himself.”
  • The phrase itself surfaces in Photoplay for June 1932 ↗ — but out of Weissmuller’s mouth, not Tarzan’s: “You see, I’m no actor. Well, I didn’t have to act in ‘Tarzan, the Ape Man’ — just said, ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane.’” Across the Media History Digital Library’s searchable fan and trade press, an exact-phrase search returns ten printings, and this is the earliest of them.
In copyright

Tarzan the Ape Man was registered for US copyright by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Distributing Corp. on 14 March 1932 (registration LP2913) and released on 2 April 1932, per the AFI Catalog ↗. US public domain currently reaches works published through 1930, so a 1932 studio release sits well inside copyright — and because screen writing is work for hire, the rights belong to the studio rather than to Novello or Hume.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What actually happened

Nobody here is falsely credited — the film is real, the scene is real, and it is one of the most watched moments in early sound cinema. What went wrong is the grammar. Three different things get collapsed into one remembered sentence:

Tarzan, on screen Never said

The picture contains no line resembling “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” Tarzan’s side of the exchange is built entirely out of two proper nouns and a pointing finger, which is precisely what makes it work: a man who has no grammar yet reaching for the only two words he needs. Wikiquote’s transcription of the film ↗ carries no such line.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel Not in the book

Burroughs’s Tarzan is literate. He teaches himself to read from picture books and writes Jane courtly full sentences — “I am Tarzan of the Apes. I want you. I am yours. You are mine… You are Jane Porter, I saw it in your letter” — in Tarzan of the Apes ↗. The monosyllabic jungle man is MGM’s invention, not Burroughs’s; the string “you Jane” appears nowhere in the novel.

Johnny Weissmuller Actually his — but off screen

The catchphrase came from the star himself, in a Photoplay interview published in June 1932 ↗, deprecating his own performance: “I should stick to Tarzan … You see, I’m no actor. Well, I didn’t have to act in ‘Tarzan, the Ape Man’ — just said, ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane.’ I’ll never be able to act.” Whether he minted the joke or repeated one already going round the lot cannot be settled from the page — but the print record starts with him, not with the screen.

So the line people quote is a real quotation by a real person — it is just not a line from the film, and Weissmuller was mocking the role rather than playing it. The words the film’s audience actually heard were written for the screen by Ivor Novello, who took the dialogue credit on the picture per the AFI Catalog ↗, working over Cyril Hume’s adaptation.

Context

Why the film had to invent a Tarzan who couldn’t talk

MGM’s difficulty in 1931 was that the Tarzan of the books talks perfectly well. Burroughs had given him a self-taught literacy and a rather formal turn of phrase, which is charming on the page and useless in a talking picture built around a champion swimmer with no acting experience. So the studio took the vocabulary away. What Novello and Hume left Weissmuller was close to nothing — and out of that nothing came the scene everyone remembers, in which two people who share no language establish the only two words that matter.

It is a genuinely good piece of writing, and it is entirely nouns. What the culture carried away instead was a grammatical joke that nobody in the film ever makes — and the man who made it was the one complaining he had not been given anything to say.

You see, I’m no actor. Well, I didn’t have to act in ‘Tarzan, the Ape Man’ — just said, ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane.’

Read the full story

Hollywood was not a happy posting for Ivor Novello. He arrived on an MGM contract off the back of a Broadway success and, by his biographers’ account, found almost nothing to do there; the dialogue for Tarzan the Ape Man was effectively the whole of it. He went home to London, wrote Glamorous Night and the run of musicals that made him one of the dominant figures in British theatre, and is remembered today for those and for “Keep the Home Fires Burning” — not for the four or five syllables of jungle dialogue that became the most quoted thing he never quite wrote.

The phrase went on to have a long afterlife in exactly the register Weissmuller pitched it in. The Media History Digital Library’s searchable press turns it up as shorthand for crude dialogue in Hollywood magazine in 1937, in Variety in 1952 and again in 1959, and in Motion Picture Daily in 1959 reporting that a new producer had discarded “Me Tarzan, you Jane” dialogue altogether. In every one of those printings it is a stick to beat the films with — never a quotation from them.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Simplicity Love

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Tarzan the Ape Man (1932 film)en.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s transcription of dialogue from the picture. Useful mostly for what is absent: the famous line is not there.
AFI Catalog: Tarzan the Ape Mancatalog.afi.com

The authoritative credits record — Cyril Hume for adaptation, Ivor Novello for dialogue — plus the 1932 MGM copyright registration.
Photoplay, June 1932 (Weissmuller interview)lantern.mediahist.org

The scanned fan-magazine page where the phrase first appears in print, spoken by the star about himself.
Ivor Novelloen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the dialogue writer, carrying the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s note that the real line was “Tarzan. Jane.” with pointing.
Tarzan of the Apes (1912)www.gutenberg.org

Burroughs’s original novel, free and searchable — where Tarzan is literate and writes full sentences, and where the phrase does not occur.
Stupid Movie Lines (Ross Petras)archive.org

One of three published transcriptions of the name-exchange scene, full-text searchable (search-inside) at the Internet Archive; access to the scans themselves is restricted.
Everything You Know Is Wrong (Paul Kirchner)archive.org

A second of the three transcriptions, printing the same run of alternating names — borrowable at the Internet Archive.

The writer of the real line

Ivor Novello

Ivor Novello

1893–1951 · Welsh composer, actor and dramatist; dialogue credit on Tarzan the Ape Man (1932)

Ivor Novello — born David Ivor Davies in Cardiff — was one of the biggest British entertainers of the first half of the twentieth century: a matinee idol who played the title role in Hitchcock’s The Lodger, and the composer, at twenty-one, of “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” the song that defined the British home front in the First World War. An MGM contract took him to Hollywood in the early 1930s and gave him strikingly little to do; writing the dialogue for Tarzan the Ape Man was essentially the sum of it, after which he returned to London and produced the string of hit musicals he is actually remembered for. The Ivor Novello Awards, named for him in 1955, still carry his name through British songwriting.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Cite this page

Tarzan the Ape Man, directed by W. S. Van Dyke, adaptation by Cyril Hume, dialogue by Ivor Novello (Culver City, CA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1932). Popular wording quoted from Johnny Weissmuller in Photoplay (June 1932), digitized scan leaf 773, Media History Digital Library.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/me-tarzan-you-jane/

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