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Glite Dictionary
ba-dum ching

ba-dum ching

9.9
A short musical drum sound played after a joke to show it is funny
  • noun
  • /bəˈdʌm ˈtʃɪŋ/
  • Informal
translation icon : ba-dum ching
  • He ended his story with a clever punchline and a dramatic ba-dum ching.

Examples

  • The television show added a recorded ba-dum ching whenever a character made a bad pun.

  • The comedian finished his set with a classic ba-dum ching.

  • After the comedian told his joke, someone in the audience made a ba-dum ching sound.

  • After telling the joke, he added a dramatic ba-dum ching!

  • After the comedian told his joke, someone in the audience made a ba-dum ching sound to indicate that it was funny.

  • He ended his story with a clever punchline, followed by a resounding ba-dum ching from the audience.

  • The television show played a ba-dum ching sound effect every time a character delivered a cheesy joke.

Synonyms

perfect rimshot
vsba-dum ching
  • Jargon
7.1

A sharp drum hit timed to make a joke sound funnier

is an imitative sound lacking precise musical timing

Antonyms

silence
660 2.0

A period with no sound or speech

Surface Forms

ba-dum ching singular
ba-dum chings plural

Morphology

ba-dum + ching

The expression is clearly onomatopoeic: combining a percussive ‘ba-dum’ with a high, ringing ‘ching’ makes a rimshot-like sound that learners who know the constituent sound-words can plausibly infer. However, the conventional pragmatic function—used specifically to punctuate a punchline or joke—is a cultural/usage convention and not strictly compositional, and ‘ba-dum’ is not a standard dictionary lemma here, which reduces full predictability. For these reasons the phrase is only partially transparent to learners.

Etymology

Ba-dum ching comes from the noise a drummer makes after a joke: a quick drum hit (ba-dum) followed by a bright cymbal crash (ching). This imitation sound is used to 'mark the punchline' and show that a joke has just been told.