The Fascinating History of “Close, But No Cigar”
It’s not just an idiom — at one point there were real cigars involved.
Most people have heard the idiom, “Close, but no cigar” (or its variant “Nice try, but no cigar”) and instantly understood the meaning: To fall just short of accomplishing a goal, or to get something nearly — but not completely — correct. But when you stop to think about it, why would anyone expect to get a cigar for accomplishing a goal? Let’s take a brief journey through history to find out.
When we step into our time machine, we can set the destination to the late 1700s to arrive in London, England, where we’ll meet two men who share the title “Father of the Modern Circus”: Philip Astley (1742–1814) and Charles Dibdin (1745–1814). Dibdin actually coined the word “circus,” from the Latin circus, via the Greek kirkos, meaning “a circle or a ring.” The Romans used the term to refer to enclosures without roofs that were used for races and performances. Both Astley and Dibdin built very popular shows around elaborate equestrian demonstrations and performances, eventually adding other forms of entertainment.
Inspired by the acts that appeared at fairs and pleasure gardens of London and Paris, Astley added clowns, jugglers, rope dancers, and acrobats to his shows in the late 1700s. His inexpensive performances drew huge crowds, and by the mid 1800s, there were hundreds of circuses in England. The development of the railroad allowed large circuses to travel further and reach the remotest towns, and the traveling circus (or the “tenting circus”) was introduced in the late 1830s. By the end of the century, British and American circuses were touring across Europe and the United States. Circus owners began expanding their entertainment and added games of skill and chance that were held in side stalls. These included games like ring toss, tossing games, dart games, and shooting galleries, which seemed simple enough to play, but did not yield their prizes easily.
In his 1902 book, The Night Side of London, Robert Machray describes the side stalls games located in London’s East End (emphasis mine):
All around the capacious yard … are ranged various devices for extracting pennies from your pockets. They are mostly of the three-shies-a-penny variety, and a spice of skill (or would you call it luck?) enters into them all. If you are successful, a prize rewards you. You are anxious to enter the spirit of the thing, and you begin by investing a penny in three rings, which you endeavor to throw in such a way to land them round the handle of a knife stuck in a wall. It looks easy, and you go into the business with a light heart. But — you don’t succeed. Another penny — you try again, and again you are defeated. What O! Another penny — and this time you accept defeat, and move on to the next stall, where another penny gives you the privilege of trying to roll three balls into certain holes with numbers attached thereunto. Should you score twenty you will win a cigar.
Machray knew that circus owners make the most money from games where players overestimate their chances of winning. Those who experience a near miss (or almost win) will continue to play, believing that a win is inevitable — a phenomenon known in modern psychology as the “near miss effect.” Several studies show that gamblers who experience a near miss in a game interpret it as a sign that a win is “just around the corner,” and brain scans of gamblers show that a near miss activates the same reward systems in the brain as an actual win. The near miss effect can be increased when the time to placing a bet and starting a new game is decreased. In short, the more you lose, the more you believe you are just about to win. As Machray describes it:
But you do no more than score nine. Undiscouraged, or perhaps encouraged by this fact, you spend another penny, and another, and another — but you don’t get the cigar, and it is well for you that you don’t! For there are cigars and cigars. On you go, and next you try your hand at the cocoa-nuts, or the skittles, or the clay-pipes, or in the shooting-alleys. And so on and on — until your stock of pennies and patience is exhausted.
But why all the cigars? During the Victorian era, smoking a cigar was a way of celebrating an achievement, like winning a tournament, or reaching an important personal or business milestone. And compared to the cost of other circus prizes like liquor, hats, or chalkware (porcelain dolls), cigars were relatively inexpensive (a few cents) and easy to store (cigars could be packed in boxes of 200).
It’s highly likely that Victorian London circus workers used the phrase “Close, but no cigar” in this context, but the actual idiom does not appear in print until the early 1920s. Idiom detective Barry Popik explains it this way:
A cigar was traditionally one of the rewards at carnivals for winning at games of skill or chance. Coney Island offered many such games in the early 1900s. Most people did not win a prize; for them, the carnival barker would declare: ‘Close, but no cigar!’
Brewer’s Dictionary of Modern Phrase & Fable, meanwhile, traces the origin to a specific game:
The allusion is to the Highball, a fairground “try-your-strength” machine with a pivot that the contestant hits with a hammer in the hope of sending a projectile up high enough to hit a bell. Those who succeed are awarded a cigar by the proprietor. The expression, like the machine itself, derives from US carnivals.
As does the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, but with the Wheel of Fortune instead of the Highball.
‘Close but no cigar’ originated at traveling carnivals and sideshows. When the barker spun the wheel of fortune, the winner was customarily rewarded with the gift of a cigar. When the wheel stopped just short of the player’s number the carney barker would offer as consolation: ‘Sorry. Close — but no cigar.’
But despite these, and other, sources that trace the phrase’s origin to American carnival games in the 1920s, the discussion in Machray’s book of cigar prizes for stall games in 19th century London points convincingly to an origin in England. Since many British circuses traveled throughout America (and vice-versa), it’s easy to see how the phrase traveled across the pond. Nevertheless, the first time the idiom appears in print is as the headline of a May 18, 1929, article in the Long Island Daily Press about a man who was “believed to have set a world’s record in the business of getting-defeated-for-the-presidency.” The next printed reference is from The Princeton Alumni Weekly (July 2, 1929):
The long distance trophy, an appropriately inscribed silver cigarette case, was awarded to Em Gooch who had made the trip from Lincoln, Neb. for the occasion. Several other members came close, but no cigar, and we trust that all those in New York and Philadelphia who failed to show up, without reason, will read these lines with a quiver.
The phrase, like cigars themselves, enjoyed increasing popularity throughout the early 1900s. A search of Google Books shows that the use of the word “cigar” rose steadily from 1820, peaked in 1908, and started a sharp downward trend that lasted until 1979. But despite its popularity in the U.S., it’s likely that “close, but no cigar” was first used in England in the late 1800s, by barkers at traveling circuses in Europe, and through cross-pollination, made its way to America, where it finally found its way into print in the 1920s. Since cigars are no longer the coveted prize they once were, perhaps it’s time to update the phrase with a more generic term, like “Close, but no jackpot.” What would you suggest?
If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy my book, Serendipitous Discoveries from the Bookshelf, based on my popular blog, Atkins Bookshelf, which explores the world of ideas — through books, movies, music, quotations, and the English language — for the intellectually curious.
