To describe a task as “like shooting fish in a barrel” is to say it is almost absurdly easy, so easy that success is guaranteed before you start. The phrase often carries a second edge too: it can hint that the person doing the shooting has an unfair advantage, or that there is something faintly unsporting about a contest with no real challenge in it. It is used of anything from a quiz question to a business deal to a sporting fixture where one side has no realistic chance against the other.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘like shooting fish in a barrel’?
The phrase is American and belongs to the early twentieth century. A possible earlier sighting comes from the Neodesha Daily Derrick, a Kansas newspaper, on 29 April 1898, which wrote that “war incidents resemble shooting fish in a barrel” during the Spanish-American War. That line is ambiguous, since it may simply be describing the US Navy’s bombardment of Matanzas in Cuba rather than invoking the idea of effortless ease, so it cannot be relied on as the first use of the idiom proper.
The earliest clear example in the modern sense, identified by the researcher Pascal Tréguer, appears in a humorous column in the New Orleans Times-Democrat on 11 February 1902. In a whisky-tasting anecdote, one man asks another how he managed something, and gets the reply: “Just as simple as shooting fish in a barrel.” By the time the writer Gene Fowler used the line “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel” in his 1931 book The Great Mouthpiece, it was dropped in without any explanation, suggesting the expression was already well established and needed no introduction.
Quite why shooting fish in a barrel should stand for easy success is less certain than when the phrase appeared. The usual explanation is simply that fish confined in a small space make an obviously easier target than fish swimming freely in open water, which is a logical enough image without needing any real event behind it. A popular story claims the phrase comes from the days before refrigeration, when live fish were kept packed tightly into barrels of water to stay fresh, so that any shot fired into the barrel was bound to hit one. This explanation is widely repeated but has not been traced to any dated evidence, and the expression is best treated as a vivid figure of speech rather than a description of an actual practice.