The first Hooters restaurant opened its doors in Clearwater, Florida, on October 4, 1983. The idea was conceived by six friends with no experience in the restaurant business who wanted to open up a place that they couldn’t be kicked out of. As for the reason behind the name, their website puts it this way: “What else brings a gleam to men’s eyes everywhere besides beer and chicken wings and an occasional winning football season?” The answer, if it isn’t immediately apparent to you, is breasts. Yes, “hooters” is a reference to breasts, not owls, as opposed to what the cartoons covering their waitresses’ breasts might lead you to believe.
That raises an interesting question: Why “hooters”? If they were looking for something food or beverage-related, wouldn’t “melons” or “jugs” suit their purpose better? Well, several publications cite Steve Martin’s use of the word on TV as the source of inspiration. But wait just a minute, are we to understand that Martin was the first person to call breasts “hooters”? That can’t be, can it?
As it turns out, “hooters” as a slang term for breasts predates the restaurant by more than a decade, so if Martin did come up with it himself, the owners of Hooters waited quite a while to put that inspiration to good use. The fact of the matter is, however, that Martin’s influence only dates back to May 17, 1980, when the comedian hosted Saturday Night Live for the eighth time. In his opening monologue, Martin performs a piece called “What I Believe,” in which he says, “I believe it’s derogatory to refer to a woman’s breasts as ‘boobs,’ ‘jugs,’ ‘winnebagos,’ or ‘golden bozos,’ and you should only refer to them as ‘hooters.’” The bit eventually made its way onto Martin’s final stand-up album, The Steve Martin Brothers, in 1981, and was also turned into a short film, which you can check out below.
Despite the different versions that were done prior to the restaurant’s existence, and the fact that there was a joke about the American Hooter Society in an earlier SNL episode from 1979, the official Hooters Facebook page has gone on record singling out Martin’s 1980 SNL monologue as the piece that gave the franchise its name. At the end of the day, according to the people running their social media accounts, that was the specific version the chain’s founders recalled when it came time to christen their inaugural breast-themed location.
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