Do these words really go together?

In the car on the way to an off-site meeting with a co-worker the other day, we were listening to a CD of a comedian. This comedian probably has a name, but I have no idea what it is. He claims to have been born in Australia, but he moved to New York when he was 12. Maybe that explains his interesting and colorful phraseology. When describing something that frightened him he used the following words: "When I first saw that, it scared the ass out of me." He also used it again in slightly modified form, saying that something "annoyed the ass out of [him]."

That's a sequence of words that might very well never have occurred to me if left to my own devices. However, now that I've encountered it, thanks to this funny Aussie-cum-New Yorker, I love it. I'm adopting it as part of the official Abs argot.