Context
The most famous last line in American comedy
Jerry, hiding from the Chicago mob in a dress and calling himself Daphne, has accidentally acquired a fiancé: the wealthy, serenely unbothered Osgood Fielding III. In the boat at the end of the picture, Jerry tries to get out of the engagement by confessing escalating faults — he is not a natural blonde, he smokes, he has a terrible past, he can never have children — and Osgood forgives each one in turn. Out of excuses, Jerry pulls off the wig and drops into his own voice. Osgood barely blinks.
The line was very nearly not the line at all. Wikipedia’s account of the film, citing The Hollywood Reporter ↗, records that Diamond and Wilder put it into the script as a placeholder until they could think of something better, and never did. Whatever was said in the writers’ room, the four words survived the shoot, the release and sixty-odd years of quotation without a syllable changing — which is rarer than it sounds, and is the reason this page ends up confirming the wording rather than correcting it.
Out of excuses, Jerry pulls off the wig. Osgood barely blinks.
Did the film originate the line?
The scene is original to the screenplay; the phrase is not. Some Like It Hot is an adaptation — the story credit goes to Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan for the 1935 French film Fanfare of Love ↗, whose 1951 German remake supplied the working script after the original proved untraceable. But the same source records that Wilder built the gangster plot himself, and the closing beat — Osgood, the boat, the wig — belongs to the Wilder and Diamond screenplay, not to any novel or play. There is no earlier book to hand the credit back to.
The four words, though, were ordinary English long before 1959. George Eliot gives them to Caleb Garth in Middlemarch: “Well, well, nobody’s perfect, but” — page 58 of the 1872 second volume ↗, in a quiet scene between a father and daughter about the compromises of marriage. This is an observation, not a claim of descent: no evidence connects Eliot to Wilder, and nothing here suggests the phrase was rare. What the film did was not coin the words but find the one situation in which they land as a punchline.