Meaning
Of an actor: to overact wildly, performing in an exaggerated, melodramatic style that swamps the play. By extension it describes anyone behaving in a wildly theatrical or over-emphatic way in public. Mainly American show-business slang, but widely understood elsewhere. Informal and show-business flavoured; teasing rather than insulting. Regional use: American English.
Origin
American theatrical slang of the late nineteenth century: the picture is of a ham actor so extravagant that he seems about to devour the painted stage set. The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, summarised in Random House's Maven's Word of the Day (reprinted in the TheatreCrafts glossary), traces an 1894 use in Coeur d'Alene, a novel by Mary Hallock Foote serialised in Century Magazine. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and several popular references credit Dorothy Parker, who wrote of an actor chewing the scenery in a 1930 review, but the 1894 citation predates her by decades, so the attribution cannot stand; at most she gave the phrase wider currency.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- chew the furniture
- chew up the scenery
- chewing the scenery
- scene-chewing
Usage Examples
- The villain spent the whole third act chewing the scenery, and the audience loved every minute of it.
- She plays the grieving mother with real restraint, resisting every temptation to chew the scenery.
- Whenever the negotiations hit a snag, he starts chewing the scenery as if the office were on fire.