To say ‘colour me shocked’ is to ask to be labelled with whatever adjective follows: consider me shocked. The template takes any adjective - colour me surprised, impressed, sceptical - but in practice it is usually deadpan. ‘Colour me shocked’ most often means the speaker is not shocked in the slightest: the politician has broken the promise, the sequel is worse than the original, and the speaker saw it all coming. Said straight it can be genuine, but the ironic reading dominates.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘colour me shocked’?
The construction is American and can be dated with unusual precision to the early 1960s. Its source is the children’s colouring book. Colouring books had long carried instructional captions telling the child which crayon to reach for: colour the dog brown, colour the sky blue. In 1962 that nursery convention collided with political satire. The cartoonist Mort Drucker’s JFK Coloring Book, a spoof of the Kennedy White House for adults, spent 14 weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, with captions such as ‘Color him red, white, and blue’ for the President and ‘Color her beautiful’ for the First Lady. Adult colouring books sold about a million dollars’ worth that year, and although the genre died with the assassination, the caption formula had already lodged in the language.
The same year gave the formula a sentimental showcase. John Kander and Fred Ebb’s torch song ‘My Coloring Book’ (1962) has a jilted singer inviting the listener to crayon in the wreckage of her love affair, each item in a suitably miserable shade. It charted twice that winter, for Sandy Stewart and Kitty Kallen, and was an early Streisand recording too. Streisand kept the association going: her 1966 album Color Me Barbra, released alongside her first colour television special (CBS, 30 March 1966), reached number 3 in the US and put the wordplay in front of a very large audience.
By then ‘Color me…’ was a full-blown title fashion, stretching from Herschell Gordon Lewis’s splatter film Color Me Blood Red (1965) to the Winstons’ Grammy-winning single ‘Color Him Father’ (1969). Freed from the crayon box, the phrase settled into everyday speech as a way of tagging oneself with a state of mind, and it was teen slang by the late 1980s - Heather Duke greets a petition with ‘Color me stoked’ in the 1989 film Heathers. Somewhere along the way the deadpan version took over, and ‘colour me shocked’ became the standard dress for mock surprise. British writers borrowed the construction and respelled it, though it still carries a faint American accent. The colour comes from a crayon, not from the older flag-and-heraldry family of colour idioms such as nail your colours to the mast.