A Fella Could Go Broke With a Hobby Like This

About

A Fella Could Go Broke With a Hobby Like This refers to a scene from an episode of Columbo in which Lieutenant Columbo comments on how expensive maintaining an exotic greenhouse must be. In September 2022, a cropped image of Columbo paired with the line achieved popularity as an exploitable, being superimposed over images of hobby stores to joke about the expensiveness of trading cards, wargame miniatures and collectible items.

Origin

On October 15th, 1972, episode two "Greenhouse Jungle" of season two of the drama series Columbo premiered in the united States.^[1] In one scene of the episode, Columbo talks with Jarvis Goodland, an owner of an exotic greenhouse, an comments that maintaining such a hobby must be very expensive (still image shown below).

Boy, a fella could go broke with a hobby like this.

On September 14th, 2022, X^[2] / Twitter account columbo screenshots (@ColumboScreens) posted the still image, with the post garnering over 110 reposts and 680 likes in one year.

On September 16th, 2022, X^[3] user @mecha_tho cropped out Columbo and Goodland from the image, superimposing them over a display of Gundam toys. The post (shown below) received over 4,200 reposts and 19,000 likes in one year.

Spread

In the following weeks, the format saw spread in tabletop and card gaming communities online: for example, on September 17th and 18th, Redditors soytrekpat1 and Nomadatic posted Warhammer 40,000 versions of the meme in /r/Grimdank^[4] and /r/Warhammer,^[5] with the posts (shown below, left and right) garnering over 4,400 upvotes and 540 upvotes, respectively.

Following a period of active use online in late September and October 2022, the meme format maintained limited presence in memes in 2023, being used to create memes about various expensive hobbies.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References