Songfacts®:

• Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo co-wrote this song with Seann Bowe (In Flames' "Like Sand," The Veronicas "The Only High") and Chris Sernel, also known as Oh, Hush! (Cee Lo Green's "What Part of Forever", Britt Nicole's "Concrete").
  
  "Like many cool Weezer songs (it) has a sad message wrapped in a sunny package," the band wrote on Twitter. "Sort of a companion piece to 'Island In The Sun' from 2001, but instead of being a pure fantasy about an escape, the guy in 'Happy Hour' is chained to reality, looking around for a break from the routine. It's not hard to relate, but unlike that guy, fortunately we have new Weezer music to listen to!"
• Rivers Cuomo compares himself in the second verse to "Ponce de Leon setting on a ship for the new world."
  
  Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León (1474 – July 1521), was a lieutenant under Christopher Columbus. He founded the first Spanish settlement on Puerto Rico, Caparra, on August 8, 1508 and later served as the first governor of the island, by appointment of the Spanish crown. On Easter Sunday 1513, Ponce de León became the first known European to set foot on Florida, while purportedly searching for the Fountain of Youth in the New World. In de León's Spanish tongue, the Easter festival was known as "Pascua Florida", meaning the Passover of Flowers after the many flowers decorating the church on that day. Thus he named the newly discovered land "Florida."
• But then my boss calls and she's crushin' me with a 20 ton weight
  Just like in Monty Python
  
  Rivers Cuomo discussed the unintentional irony in the song lyrics during an interview with NPR:
  
  "I never intend to be ironic. I was writing stream of consciousness or free association where the first image that comes in your head, that's what you have to write. And the first thing I thought of was the 20-ton weight falling on somebody and crushing them in Monty Python. And that seemed perfectly reasonable to me. And then of course when any other human hears that they're like, you can't sing about Monty Python on a pop-rock song, you must be ironic."
• The song is a series of stream-of-consciousness lyrics depicting the joy of hanging out at a bar during happy hour. For the track's third verse Cuomo imagined meeting "a scientist in sweatpants and a hair tie." He told Billboard that she is based on the actress Rosie Okumura (The Majority), who Cuomo once actually met in Santa Monica.
  
  "One day I went over to her apartment and she showed me her keyboards because she's an aspiring songwriter and singers," he explained. "I just used details from her room and that conversation to fill out this imaginary encounter with a scientist."