shit just got real

While it almost certainly predates the film, the phrase shit just got real was popularized by the 2003 Michael Bay-directed action-thriller Bad Boys II.

The film features two cops, Detective Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Detective Mike Lowrey (Will Smith), as they investigate the dealings of a Cuban drug cartel. In one melodramatic scene, Burnett receives some disturbing news over the phone and tells Lowrey that shit just got real, as if to say that the investigation (shit) had become much more serious—that the stakes had risen (got real).

Shit, here, means any “thing” or “stuff,” (which is what it has meant since the 1930s). Getting real, or “serious,” draws on long-running slang senses of real for “authentic” (e.g., Get real!, real deal, or the real thing).

The Bad Boys scene was apparently so over-the-top that the phrase was then used in Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s 2007 Hot Fuzz, a parody of the buddy-cop film genre.

The phrase went viral in a 2012 meme featuring the usually agreeable Sesame Street characters holding knives and machine guns. This was in response to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney declaring in a debate that if elected, he would get rid of subsidies for PBS, which produces Sesame Street. The presidential hopeful did mention that he loves Big Bird, but apparently that didn’t cut it for Elmo and the gang—threatening their existence made them ready to fight back, because shit just got real.

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And, then there was this trend …. this graduate’s shit just got real.

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