In December 1930 “The Arizona Daily Star” of Tucson, Arizona printed an instance within a section dedicated to contributions from readers:⁸

In July 1921 an article in “The Phonograph” of St. Paul, Nebraska credited an unnamed local business man with an instance referring to golf:³ In 1983 Douglas Adams and John Lloyd published “The Meaning of Liff”. The authors invented definitions for words such as “snitterfield”:¹⁶ In March 1948 engineer H. Astbury delivered a speech to the Rotary Club of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, England. Astbury described an instance using the word “mad” instead” of “crazy”:¹⁴ Office noticeboard on which snitters (q.v.), cards saying ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here, but if you are it helps!!!’ and slightly smutty postcards from Ibiza get pinned up by snitterbies (q.v.).

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instantly memorable and spread through offices and workshops like wildfire. The sort of thing one can buy a printed sign of in a joke shop.’ Since c. 1960. Additional details and citations are available in the article on the Medium platform which is located here.

Jul: A man don’t have to be crazy to play golf, but it helps a great deal. (Attributed to unnamed business man in St. Paul, Nebraska) You don’t have to visit too many offices, before you will see or hear some reference to the well-worn phrase, ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps.’One of the captions, written by Ralph Spence, reads: “You don’t have to be crazy to dance the Charleston, but it helps.”

Mr. Disney is never too busy to be genuinely interested in each individual. He often says jokingly: ‘You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!’” Humane, hilarious and heart-breaking, You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here is an enlightening and darkly comic window into the world of psychiatry One of the business men of this city remarked last year, when certain fellows were trying to organize a golf club, that “A man don’t have to be crazy to play golf, but it helps a great deal.” That man now carries a golf bag and he plays the game with the rest of the fellows …

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Sep: You don’t have to be a nut to go hunting and fishing, but it helps. (Columnist Hank in Springfield, Illinois newspaper) In conclusion, “You don’t have to be crazy to X, but it helps” is the template of a snowclone. An instance with X = “believe in Free Trade” was circulating by June 1920. The creator was anonymous. Subsequent variants included “play golf” and “dance the Charleston”. In November 1933 Walt Disney received credit for “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!” But of Speight, who died in 1998 at thee age of 78, Antrobus will say: “ I enjoyed working with him – and drinking with him. He introduced me to George Bernard Shaw.” Adam Breede, invited to join a country club, responds somewhat enigmatically that while one does not have to be crazy to play golf, it helps a lot. English professing, according to some friends of ours, is one of those things into which some men are pushed. Once in the English professing game, they find it is not necessary to go crazy over the work, but it helps.