My mother used this phrase often when I was a child. It’s the exact equivalent of “Made you look!” I just googled it to find out how common it was and to my surprise received not a single hit (variants such ‘monkey looks’, ‘monkeys look’, etc also came up empty). I can’t believe that this was somehow peculiar to our family, although I suppose it’s possible.

Has anybody else heard it, or a phrase similar to it?

(On a sidenote, when I was very small I used to hear it as ‘monkey liver nuts’, which was puzzling, but not more so than many of the oddities that adults came up with, so I never queried it. Then, one day, the mists cleared, and I understood what was actually being said. My very first mondegreen!)

And things were never the same, hey Aldi? The mysterious phrase made unmysterious takes the fun out of a kids life.

I’ve never heard your mother’s phrase, but I like it.

Sounds like when you were growing up your Mom was a lot of fun.

I’m sure we had a thread on this or on something very similar on the old board, but I can’t find it.  I remember posting what we used to say in South Africa - “made you look, I made you look, you dirty broek”. (Broek means knickers.  We had no shame.)

I remember “made you look, made you stare, made you wet your underwear” from primary school.

What I do know is: “monkey gets the nuts”, but that doesn’t seem to fit the OP’s meaning. (FTR it’s a reference to the fable where the monkey talks the cat into getting the chestnuts out of the fire. Cat gets burned paws, monkey gets the nuts).
Maybe the two phrases got mixed up?

In Dutch we have ‘alle apies kijken’ (all monkeys are looking) with the same meaning.

So you’re a Dootchman? You’re lookin’ really toight.

Attributed to Pieter Brueghel the Elder is the painting Netherlandish Proverbs, which, as well as I know, depicts 12 Netherlandish proverbs. I would like to ask you to explain the 12 proverbs for English-speakers.

This site says there may be more than 90 proverbs illustrated.

The image of the painting there is small, and if there are supposed to be links to the details I couldn’t find them.  But a larger, higher-res image is available here.

Interesting. I had previously seen a panel that Bruegel, Sr. prepared that illustrates 12 unique proverbs; beneath an illustration of someone acting foolish are sayings in Dutch. The characters displayed on that panel are to be found in Netherlandish Proverbs. I’m curious what pithy sayings a knife-wielding sleepwalker can inspire.

Here’s a site giving all proverbs and their location in the painting but it is all in Dutch. Here’s one giving explanations in English and German. Seems there are well over 100 of them.

I hope these will do.