Bill Bellamy should have had a spaceship by now. By his math, he’d have earned a flying saucer full of cash if he’d only thought to trademark the term “booty call” after inventing the phrase for a comedy bit back in the ‘90s.
“At the time I wasn’t thinking of it like that,” Bellamy said on the People in the ‘90s podcast. “I was just thinking of my joke. I didn’t realize the phrase would catch on to become 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.”
Young Bellamy was thinking in terms of punchlines, not intellectual property. “If I would have known what a trademark could be at in 1991,” he said on Big Boy UNCUT, “I’d probably be sitting on about 200 million right now.” (Big Boy disagreed, optimistically putting the number in the billions.) “There’s so many ways it’s been used for so many different things.”
The phrase became so ingrained in pop culture, Bellamy told Big Boy, because it was easy to say and not overtly vulgar. Taco Bell even appropriated it for an advertising campaign, inviting the hungry to a “foodie call.”
So where did “booty call” originate? “The concept came from Mike Tyson, to be honest,” Bellamy said. “Mike Tyson got arrested in Indiana for that girl that came to his hotel room. And the girl in her interview said, ‘I don’t know why Mike asked me to come to his room at 3 in the morning.’”
But Tyson’s intent was obvious to Bellamy. “It’s a booty call!” he says. “When I was listening, I thought ‘I got it. I got something.’ I knew as soon as it just came off the tip of my tongue like that, I was like, ‘I got something.’” When Bellamy dropped the phrase at a comedy club, the crowd went nuts. Russell Simmons was there with executives from HBO and boom, that’s how Bellamy landed Def Comedy Jam.
These days, he told People in the 90s, the term doesn’t have quite the same meaning due to the invention of dating apps. “Now they got Tinder, they’re cheating,” he says. “Back in the day, you had to really make the call. We had to get the number. Now you just see a picture and you swipe.”
“Booty call” is the comedy catchphrase that changed Bellamy’s life. “You don’t know that you can do something that’ll stick,” he told Esquire. “You don’t know which one people are going to rally around. You’re just an artist and you create, and then you let the wave go where the wave goes.”
