A peanut gallery was, in the days of vaudeville, a nickname for the cheapest (and ostensibly rowdiest) seats in the theater, which was all too willing to heckle the performer. The least expensive snack served at the theater would often be peanuts, which the patrons would sometimes throw at the performers on stage to show their disapproval. The phrases "no comments from the peanut gallery" or "quiet in the peanut gallery" are extensions of the name, meaning the great unwashed should defer to their betters.
In the late 1940s the Howdy Doody show adopted the name to represent its audience of 40 children.
In recent times, the term has taken on new meanings with the advent of social networks and online chat rooms. "Peanut gallery" may also refer to a social network audience that passively observes a syndicated web feed or chat room.
Famous quotes containing the words peanut and/or gallery:
“It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.... There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.”
—Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)
“I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)