bring down the house

1. Also, bring the house down. Evoke tumultuous applause and cheers, as in Her solo brought the house down. This hyperbolic term suggests noise loud enough to pose a threat to the building—an unlikely occurrence. In the late 1800s, British music-hall comedians punned on it: when the audience greeted a joke with silence, they said, “Don't clap so hard; you'll bring down the house (it's a very old house).” [Mid-1700s]

Example Sentences

She’s also the director of critical hit “Bring Down the House,” a two-part adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Henry VI” trilogy that premiered in Seattle and made its way to OSF.

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Bring down the house with this week’s Slate News Quiz.

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Not everyone can bring down the house with a song like “Endangered Species.”

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When that show played the Meadowbrook in Cedar Grove, N.J., in 1960, Carole Cleaver, reviewing for The Wyckoff News, wrote, “Tiny Tina and Coco Ramirez dance themselves to exhaustion as the difficult Ababu princesses and bring down the house.”

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“In a lot of the moments when it’s really high stakes and dark themes are happening, she is a beacon of comedy and light. That’s always really fun — to be able to bring down the house during a quiet, serious moment.”

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