Deadpan, an adjective for a flat, unsmiling affect, as in deadpan humor, comes from pan as slang for “face.” By the early 1900s pan could mean the human face, so a deadpan was a face with nothing happening on it. Early uses of deadpan show up in sportswriting, including descriptions of ballplayers and later boxer Joe Louis as the “Deadpan Dynamiter.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Deadpan Means a Flat Expression from Pan, Slang for Face”
I was mid-conversation the other day and somebody talked about deadpan humor and we all kind of stopped and thought, deadpan? What is deadpan all about? Do you know, Grant? I think so, yeah. It’s your face. Your pan is your face. So your deadpan is where nothing’s happening on your face.
Yes, I had to go look that up. And it turns out that, yes, back in the early 1900s, the human face was sometimes referred to as a pan. And I did some more digging on that. And it looks like the earliest uses of deadpan are in the early 20th century.
And it’s sports writers talking about either a baseball player or a little bit later, people talked about Joe Lewis, the boxer, being the deadpan dynamiter because he didn’t have an expression as he was pounding away on somebody.
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While the earliest known use of “dead pan” in print is from the sports pages of the St. Louis Star and Times in 1915, that particular 1915 quote says it originated with actors. Here’s a deep dive into its origin: https://etymology.kenliss.com/blog/?p=490