This question is used to suggest that someone looks or sounds shifty, the kind of person you would instinctively distrust in a financial dealing. It plays on the old stereotype of the used-car salesman as someone who will smile and lie to close a sale, so asking whether you would buy a car from a particular man is really asking whether you would trust him at all. It is most often aimed at politicians, usually alongside an unflattering photograph, but it has been extended to anyone whose manner invites suspicion.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘would you buy a used car from this man?’?
The phrase was coined as a political joke at the Democratic National Convention in July 1960, aimed squarely at the Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon. An Associated Press report filed on 11 July 1960 by Arthur Edson described a planned television gag in which Nixon’s picture would appear on screen while an announcer intoned, “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Within days the same idea had hardened into the caption form familiar today. The New York Times reported it as the convention’s most popular joke among Democrats, run under one of Nixon’s more glowering photographs with the line “Would you buy a used car from this man?” as the caption.
The joke is often credited to the comedian Mort Sahl, but period sources point elsewhere. Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation, credited the New York-based political journalist Noel E. Parmentel, Jr. with introducing the line, not Sahl. Sahl’s later association with the gag, repeated so often that it has become the popular belief, appears to be a case of a sharper-tongued performer getting the credit for someone else’s line once it caught on.
The joke endured well beyond the 1960 campaign because it fits any public figure whose trustworthiness is in question, and it has been recycled against numerous politicians and public figures since, usually with a deliberately unflattering photograph attached. The used-car dealer image at its centre is itself an old piece of American folk suspicion, related to the broader wariness around buying any second-hand vehicle sight unseen, the same distrust that lies behind the British phrase ‘Friday afternoon car’ for a car assembled carelessly.