All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy is a proverb. It means that without time off from work, a person becomes both bored and boring.

History

Though the spirit of the proverb had been expressed previously, the modern saying appeared first in James Howell's Proverbs in English, Italian, French and Spanish (1659), and was included in later collections of proverbs. It also appears in Howell's Paroimiographia (1659), p. 12.

Some writers have added a second part to the proverb, as in Harry and Lucy Concluded (1825) by the Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth:

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,
All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy.

Uses in popular media

While the proverb is used in several examples of popular media (from James Joyce's short story, "Araby", to Jack Kerouac's Big Sur, to the 1957 movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai), probably the most famous example appears in the 1980 movie The Shining, when the main character (played by Jack Nicholson) types up the sentence on reams of sheets of paper. The proverb's psychotic use in The Shining had some effect on popular culture, inspiring several other works to include a direct homage to the scene: for example, a 1994 episode of The Simpsons, "Treehouse of Horror V" contained a parody of the phrase, when Marge finds No TV and no beer make Homer go crazy written all over the walls. In a 1999 episode of Family Guy, "Peter, Peter, Caviar Eater", when Stewie was riding his tri-bike at Lois's big inherited house and met the twins from The Shining at a corridor and they said "Come play with us Stewie for ever, and ever and ever", Stewie replied back to them "All work and no play makes Stewie a dull boy". A 2002 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Gone", includes a scene where Buffy Summers fills a social worker's report with pages consisting entirely of repetitions of "All work and no play make Doris a dull girl". In a 2009 episode of Wizards of Waverly Place, Max Russo played by Jake T. Austin, says the line to Alex Russo played by Selena Gomez when he is doing an impression of Jack Nicholson. This reveals that he has seen The Shining. A 2001 episode of CSI also includes a scene where Greg Sanders is caught dancing in the lab by his boss, and says "All work and no play makes Greg a dull boy". Gil Grissom responds by saying that all play and no work makes Greg an unemployed boy. During "Cafe Disco", an episode on the popular NBC series "The Office", Dwight makes a remark after Michael states that the office has gotten boring, saying "All work and no play makes Michael a dull boy!". The episode of the cartoon Ed, Edd n Eddy titled "Stop, Look and Ed" features Eddy telling Rolf that "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". More recently it was used in Season 1, Episode 5 of the TV series "Downton Abbey" when Mary tells Matthew that "You know what all work and no play did for Jack" and Matthew answers that "You think I'm a dull boy anyway, don't you."

Computer viruses

The "Sunday" computer virus, a member of the Jerusalem virus family discovered in 1989, contained a reference to the proverb. Infected files will contain the string "Today is Sunday! Why do you work so hard? All work and no play make you a dull boy! Come on! Let's go out and have some fun!" The virus's payload prints the proverb on the screen and then deletes all files running while the virus is a resident in the memory, as the original Jerusalem did every Friday the 13th.