“800-pound gorilla” is an American English expression for an entity so powerful that it can act without regard to the rights of others or the law.[1] The phrase is rooted in a riddle joke:
Q. Where does an 800-pound gorilla sit?
A. Anywhere it wants to.
The copyright on this cartoon is 1986.
Unless maybe Larson made an error, and it should have been “800-lb” even then.
kagis
Yeah, I only see one reference online to “500-lb gorilla”. I think that he maybe just misremembered the phrase.
Google nGrams doesn’t have any instances of the phrase, so that can’t really help with frequency.
Somehow, it seems to have increased from 500-lb to be an 800-lb gorilla today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/800-pound_gorilla
The copyright on this cartoon is 1986.
Unless maybe Larson made an error, and it should have been “800-lb” even then.
kagis
Yeah, I only see one reference online to “500-lb gorilla”. I think that he maybe just misremembered the phrase.
Google nGrams doesn’t have any instances of the phrase, so that can’t really help with frequency.
They probably realized that 500 lb isn’t that unusual for the average American and looking like a gorilla isn’t that unusual either.