This bad boy was notably featured in 2014 with the Slaps Roof of Car meme, which featured a car salesman hitting the roof of a car while showing it to a prospective buyer and saying something along the lines of: “This bad boy can fit so much in it.” Like most memes, it inspired variations featuring things other than cars.įilm and music love a bad boy, from the 1990–2000s buddy-cop franchise Bad Boys starring Martin Lawrence and Will Smith to Sean “Diddy” Combs’s 1990s record label, Bad Boy.īad boy also has tremendous international appeal in music, from 1987 reggae track “Bad Boy” by Inner Circle to the 2018 Kpop hit “Bad Boy” by Red Velvet. Uzbek artist Musofir’s 2016 album was named Bad Boy. Since at least the 1960s, a bad boy has referred to some excellent specimen, often used of high-powered cars or other vehicles, e.g., this bad boy can get up to 100 MPH easy. These bad boys are also popularly spoken of as having something “broken” in them some women hunger to fix. In the 21st century, many relationship articles have weighed the pros and cons of falling for the bad boy, with Psychology Today explaining how their attractiveness lies in their projection of confidence and power as they break the mold. These brooding, mysterious men stood in contrast to the rule-following but boring nice guy, and were idolized as real-life actors (e.g., James Dean) or fictional characters (e.g., Tim Riggins on Friday Night Lights).
In 20th century popular culture, the bad boy increasingly became the object of sexual attraction. In 1883, George Wilbur Peck developed the mischievous, prankster character of the bad boy, known as Peck’s bad boy, who would go on to influence characters like Dennis the Menace and Bart Simpson. This was helped by Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s semi-autobiographical novel The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), credited as a first in the bad boy genre of literature.
But like so many grammar lessons through the ages, it was also a moral lesson: he was a boy who would lead himself and others to “sin and harm.” In these early printed examples of the phrase, there was nothing appealing or good about being a bad boy.īad boy took on the more desirable connotations of “rebel” in the mid–1800s. Back in 1735, a volume of John Stirling’s A Short View of English Grammar used the expression bad boy as part of a grammar lesson.