My brother and I were discussing what we would do if we came into large sums of money, and we both jokingly said (independently of each other) at the same time “hookers and blow.”
That got me thinking, that’s a fairly common way of suggesting wasteful spending of large sums of cash. When was the phrase first commonly used? What are its origins?
I don’t know, but if you ever get an audition to be on Jeopardy, and they ask what you’d do with the money if you won any, you probably want to say something else.
Hmm, a Google search was astoundingly unhelpful, and came mostly to a bunch of threads on other forums asking the same question with mostly smartass responses. Someone suggested that a rockstar said it in an interview once, but there were no sources.
I know the standard “I’ll make my own <x> with blackjack… and hookers!” line came from Futurama. But I can’t think of or find a similarly obvious source for this.
I don’t know if it’s possible to pinpoint a specific origin point, but you’re right that it’s a pretty standardized phrase. You don’t generally hear “hookers and booze” or “coke and poker” or any other number of similar phrases that communicate the same idea just as effectively.
The earliest reference I can find to the phrase in Google Books is from 2001. However, according to Google Trends, there was a HUGE spike in searches for the phrase in 2008, with them being almost non-existent before then.
Some suggest it gained much of its popularity due to its use at ar15.com (arfcom).
(I missed the edit cutoff)
In Googling “Hookers and Blow” and 2008, it becomes obvious multiple porn movies by that name came out that year. One wonders whether the spike in Google searches are a result of that porn title, or the porn title is a response to the spike in popularity of the term.
I thought its origins came from with in the New York comedy circuit, leaking it’s way into the main steam through the Howard Stern show.
2008 may have been a spike, but in 2007, Dizzy Reed, (keyboardist for Guns N’ Roses)
“When he is not touring or recording with Guns N’ Roses, Reed frequently tours with his hard rock cover band Hookers N’ Blow, in which he plays keyboard and guitar and occasionally sings lead vocals. For his work with Hookers N’ Blow, Reed was named Outstanding Keyboardist of the Year at the 2007 Rock City Awards (“Rockies”). Hookers N’ Blow was also named Best Cover Band.”
From: Dizzy Reed - Wikipedia &
Rock City Awards 2007, The Rockies
No idea when the band actually started though, but was prior to 2008.
I don’t know, but as mentioned upthread I always hear it in Bender’s voice.
It’s for questions like these that we really need a good Usenet search. Unfortunately, Google almost completely dismantled theirs a year or two ago; it’s no longer possible to search in certain date ranges, or even to order search results by date. 
I’ve been saying a huge sum of money would make me spend it on 40-year old scotch and 20 year old hookers for years. A medium windfall, 20-year old scotch and 40 year old hookers. A paltry amount, 10-year old scotch and 60 year old hookers. Now you’re getting sad. I that one in a couple of contexts, like the annual bonus is less than I think I deserve.
I feel like I invented it, but maybe not, like a gun, once I file the serial numbers off it’s hard for me to remember where I stole it.
I am probably mis-remembering, but I thought it was bandied about much earlier in response to Dallas Cowboys wide-receiver Michael Irvin being arrested in a hotel room with prostitutes, marijuana and cocaine, in 1996. The Cowboys had won their fifth Super Bowl and “hookers and blow” became the preferred response to Disney’s “I’m going to Disney World” campaign.
An even earlier origin for the meme could be the 1987 movie Robocop.
I thought it was Pat O’Brien? There was some recording of him asking somebody if they wanted to get some hookers and blow. I can’t remember the whole story, but it was joke fodder for The Soup on E! for a long time.
I can find a 1989 interview in the L.A. Times about Irving Azoff, former chairman of MCA Music Entertainment Group. The actual quote was from Glen Frey(of the Eagles) saying about the show “Wise Guys” in which he acted–
I got the idea from the whole story that the expression was well known in the world of entertainment, especially Hollywood.
I seem to recall hearing a friend use it back in college – 1991-95. I heard it as “knee deep in hookers and cocaine” IIRC. I’ve always thought it was a David Letterman bit. But I don’t know why I think that, since I’ve never really watched Letterman.
For what it’s worth, according to the SDMB’s search engine, the earliest use here on the SDMB was almost exactly 12 years ago in this post by GingerOfTheNorth.
Was the phrase uttered in the 1978 movie Blue Collar? I know one of the characters was lamenting a night of hookers and blow, but I don’t remember the exact words he used.
A further search on Wikipedia found this in the article on Matt Starr:
I first encountered the phrase on the old AOL SDMB, where a poster commented that if he came into a large sum of money, he’d blow it on a limo filled with hookers and blow.
To recap—
My 1989 cite stands.
Since my last post, I underwent hypnosis and recovered the old memory. What my friend in college always said was “knee deep in hookers and gin,” which apparently was a Letterman gag:
Cite:http://www.oocities.org/jaylipp/Letterman/topten90.html
Doesn’t beat samclem’s find, but it’s something I guess.