Phrase origin: "You ain't got to go home but you got to get out of here."

Though made popular by a song in the ’90s the expression appears to have originated a few decades earlier and it was probably just what bartenders used to say to clients who wanted to stay after closing time as the following source suggests:

You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here” is what a bar manager might say to his last remaining customers at closing time. “In the old days, the cry in the joints, when they were ready to close, was ‘you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here’” was cited in print in 1944. “You don’t have to go home (but you can’t stay here)” was the title of at least two songs in the 1990s.

5 March 1944, Boston (MA) Herald, “Stranded Tourists Discover Miami’s Palms Have Fingers,” pg. 19, col. 3:

  • In the old days, the cry in the joints, when they were ready to close, was “you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

1 January 1948, Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA), “A Correspondent’s Notebook” by Hal Boyle, pg. 4-A, col. 4 The sign said:

  • “You don’t have to go home—but you can’t stay here. Happy New Year!”

1 May 1960, Boston (MA) Globe, Padlocking of Glass Hat Leaves After-Hour Drinkers No Place to Go But Home” by Arthur Siegel, pg. 72:

  • A voice would call out, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

(www.barrypopik.com)


The phrase you seek (including the expletive) was spoken by Richard Pryor in one of his old stand-up albums (vinyl) in the '70s. I'll have to look up the exact routine and album but that's where I heard it over 40 years ago. Wish I could be more exact in answer, but that's where it originates. Cheers.