Tweedledum and Tweedledee Tweedledum and Tweedledee Tweedledum and Tweedledee are fictional characters in an English nursery rhyme and in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There". Their names may have originally come from an epigram written by poet John Byrom. The nursery rhyme has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19800. The names have since become synonymous in western popular culture slang for any two people who look and act in identical ways, generally in a derogatory context. Common versions of the nursery rhyme include: The words "Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee" make their first appearance in print in "one of
You Are Old, Father William is now mostly forgotten, and only the parody is remembered. Carroll's parody "undermines the pious didacticism of Southey's original and gives Father William an eccentric vitality that rebounds upon his idiot questioner". Martin Gardner calls it "one of the undisputed masterpieces of nonsense verse". Since then, it has been parodied further, including more than 20 versions by 1886 a version by Charles Larcom Graves, a writer for "Punch" in 1889, and "You are young, Kaiser William". In the Walt Disney animated film "Alice in Wonderland" (1951) the first stanza of the poem is recited by Tweedledee and Tweedledum as a