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If there’s one thing actor and stand-up comedian Bill Bellamy regrets, it’s trademarking the now popular phrase “booty call.”
The comedian coined the phrase in the 90s during one of his sets on HBO’s Def Comedy Jam.
While speaking as a special guest on the most recent episode of PEOPLE‘s In The 90s podcast, Bellamy shared that even though the initial joke he’d made using the phrase “booty call” was funny, he thinks the reason that the term stuck around is because it was such an accurate way of describing how men called up different chicks — and often “struck out — in their attempts to get some action.
“The reason why that blew up, I think, in my opinion, was one, the joke was really, really funny, but the phrase was so easy,” he explained on the podcast. “When I was doing it in the clubs, people started smiling, because they were like, ‘That’s what it is!'”
“Now they got Tinder — they’re cheating,” he reflected as he described how dating and hookup culture has changed since then. “Back in the day you had to really make the call. Now you can swipe left, swipe right.”
“We had to get the number,” he emphasized. “Now you just see a picture and you swipe.”
While discussing how solidified the term has become in our pop culture and whether he had thought to trademark it all those years ago, Bellamy shared:
“At the time I wasn’t thinking of it like that. I was just thinking of my joke. I didn’t realize the phrase would catch on to become, like you said, a normal word that people know what it is now. Booty call was just a clever way to say you’re trying to get a girl to come by.”
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“But who knew that everybody was going to lock in on it? I probably right now would be on a spaceship if I trademarked it,” he said jokingly. “I mean, I’d be out there with Elon Musk somewhere.”
Speaking on his time overall as one of the stars of the comedy club series, which ran on HBO from 1992 to 1997, Bellamy said that he and his fellow Def Comedy Jam comedians were influential because they acted as a “voice of the culture” who performed “topical” jokes that kept it real.
“When you go back and you watch those sets of all the comedians, guys and girls, we really, really were like the voices of the culture,” Bellamy noted. “We were topical. We were talking about subject matters that were really, really in the news and made it funny. And that’s what was the beauty of being a really great comic is we take the scope or the lens of the world and we bring it to the stage and we make it funny from our perspective, right? And that was a place where you could do whatever subject.”
