“Make like a tree and leave” is a deliberately silly way of telling someone to clear off. It belongs to a family of American slang commands built on the same joke pattern, where you “make like” a thing and then do something that sounds like a property of that thing: a tree has leaves, so you tell someone to “leave”. The humour, such as it is, comes from the pun between “leave” meaning to depart and “leave” (or “leaf”) meaning the foliage a tree produces, two words that sound alike but are unrelated. It is a knowingly corny line, usually delivered as a mock-tough or comic brush-off rather than a real threat, and it sits alongside similar constructions such as telling someone to make like a banana and split, or make like a drum and beat it.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘make like a tree and leave’?
The pun depends on treating the departure sense of “leave” as if it were linked to a tree’s leaves, when the two are in fact separate words that only sound the same. That kind of joke was already circulating in American slang by the 1920s. Green’s Dictionary of Slang records an early version from 1926, in the form “Imitate a tree, Leave”, found in Maines and Grant’s Wise-crack Dictionary, which shows the wordplay existed well before the “make like” phrasing became standard.
The “make like a tree and leave” wording itself is catalogued by Green’s Dictionary of Slang as part of a wider set of American “make like” exit lines, alongside Max Décharné’s slang dictionary Straight from the Fridge, Dad, which places this family of phrases in American usage running from the 1940s through the 1960s. The construction seems to have worked as a ready-made joke template, applied to whichever object gave the best pun.
The line is often remembered as a catchphrase from the 1985 film Back to the Future, but it was already in ordinary American use before that. Stephen King used the exact wording in his 1983 novel Christine, with a character saying “Make like a tree and leave, Jimmy, okay?”, confirming the phrase was established slang several years earlier. Back to the Future’s use of the joke likely did a great deal to spread the line into wider popular memory, but the pun itself goes back decades before the film.