Peanut Gallery

Comes from American vaudeville theatre. The cheapest seats were high up in the gallery, where patrons snacked on inexpensive peanuts and had a reputation for heckling performers, sometimes literally throwing peanuts at acts they didn't enjoy. The phrase is documented in an 1867 New Orleans Times-Picayune theatre review, with the Oxford English Dictionary recording it by 1876. There's a real, unresolved question about how much of the phrase's origin is about class versus race: gallery seating during this period was genuinely occupied by a mix of poorer white patrons, immigrants, and, in many venues, Black patrons under segregated seating policies. Historians are divided on how central that racial dimension was to the phrase's coining, rather than it being a broader classist put-down.