Tongue-in-cheek

[1][2][3] Early users of the phrase include Sir Walter Scott in his 1828 The Fair Maid of Perth.

[4] For example, in Tobias Smollett's The Adventures of Roderick Random, which was published in 1748, the eponymous hero takes a coach to Bath and on the way apprehends a highwayman.

This provokes an altercation with a less brave passenger: He looked back and pronounced with a faltering voice, 'O!

I signified my contempt of him by thrusting my tongue in my cheek, which humbled him so much, that he scarce swore another oath aloud during the whole journey.

[1] The more modern ironic sense appeared in a poem in The Ingoldsby Legends (1842) by the English clergyman Richard Barham, in which a Frenchman inspects a watch and cries: 'Superbe!

A newspaper clipping from 1833, in which a tailor whose coat was stolen from a bowling alley advertises an offer to alter the coat to fit the thief