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Light-Bulb Jokes: Charting an Era
Light-Bulb Jokes: Charting an Era by Daniel Harris
CIRCA 1950
How many Polacks does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Five - one to stand on a table and hold the bulb in the socket and four to rotate the table.
1960’s
How many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change.
CIRCA 1970
How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
One - and that’s not funny!
1980’s
How many Reagan aides does it take to screw in a light bulb?
None - they like to keep him in the dark.
I980’s
How many Holocaust revisionists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
None - they just deny that the bulb ever went out in the first place.
1980’s
How many Communists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
One, but it takes him about SO years to realize that the old one has burned out.
1986
How many Ukrainians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
They don't need light bulbs; they glow in the dark.
DATE UNKNOWN
How many Surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A fish.
EARLY I990’s
How many baby boomers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Ten - six to talk about how great it is that they`ve all come together to do this, one to screw it in. one to film
it for the news, one to plan a marketing strategy based on it and one to reminisce about mass naked bulbscrewing in the 60’s.
How many Gen X’ers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Two - one to shoplift the bulb so the boomers have something to screw in and the other to screw it in for
minimum wage.
1990’s
How many Microsoft executives does it take to screw in a light bulb?
None - Bill Cates will just redefine Darkness as the industry standard.
CIRCA 1991
How many L.A. cops does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Six—one to do it and five to smash the old bulb to splinters.
1995
How many O. J. jurors does it take to screw in a light bulb?
None of them believe it is broken.
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Light-Bulb Jokes: Charting an Era
Unlike knock-knock jokes, dead-baby jokes, dumb-blonde jokes and whydid-the-chicken-cross-the-road jokes, the light-bulb joke is uniquely political. Not only does it
make references to current events (how many Canadian separatists, how many Branch
Davidians), it also summarizes, in epigrammatic form, the history of the second half of the 20th
century, excoriating in virtually the same breath the illegal immigrant and the gainfully employed
bureaucrat, big government and big business, homosexuals and homophobes, shrinks and
paranoids. And because the light-bulb joke involves a piece of electrical equipment, it mirrors our
ambivalent attitudes toward technology, which, ever since Thomas Edison invented the
incandescent bulb in 1879, has become so complex that we can no longer install and repair our
appliances without enlisting the services of price-gouging experts In the light-bulb joke, the
ancient literary genre of the riddle demonstrates its versatility and wickedly dissects the problems
of the machine age.
The crux of the joke's humor lies in the words “how many,” since in most instances
changing a light bulb requires only one person - not the teeming hordes of support technicians
and service providers who crowd around the ladder protesting unsafe working conditions and
developing special bulb-insertion software. The light-bulb joke is, in spirit, both anti-corporate
and anti-Federal, providing a perfect vehicle for satirizing byzantine bureaucracies. It is the ideal
joke of an era of upsizing, in which both large corporations and government agencies have
bloated staffs that will allow the bulb to be changed only after the completion of environmental
impact statements, ergonomic reports and Civil Service examinations conducted for the Light
Bulb Administrator position. It is a deeply American joke, full of the rage of the Republican rebel
who despises the social welfare state and advocates instead a pioneering philosophy of self-rule.
At the risk of overstatement, you might suggest that the historical roots of the joke’s libertarian
agenda lie in the co1onists’ rejection of royalist tyranny and the 19th-century frontiersmen’s love
of personal initiative.
The light-bulb joke is also well suited to an age of consumer-protection campaigns and
media exposes of the potentially life-threatening dangers of defective products, from exploding
gas tanks to leaking silicone breast implants. It resonates with our suspicion of the rapaciousness
of specialists eager to make a quick buck at the expense of both our pocketbooks and our physical
safety, like the six garage mechanics, five of whom hold the ladder while the other gives the
estimate at the end of the month. Within the context of its virtually infinite permutations, the joke
transforms the light-bulb into a kind of symbolic Every Commodity, whose purchase and
installation is complicated by malfunctioning components and hidden costs. (How many I.B.M.
PC owners? Only one, but the purchase of the light-bulb adapter card is extra.)
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Light-Bulb Jokes: Charting an Era
The joke is peculiarly modern because it makes sense only in an era in which the middleclass homeowner maintains his own property and is unable to afford the servants who, in a longlost age of cheap immigrant labor, would have changed his bulbs for him. It is at once the epitaph
for an obsolete class of household slaves and the patriotic battle hymn of the bedraggled
housewife and the diligent handyman who cut their own lawns and unclog their own sinks. In the
late 2Oth century, we are all bulb changers, participants in a pedestrian task that unites the rich
with the poor.
The light bulb is a highly charged ideological object in our aging democracy - an emblem
of normality, of a society that stigmatizes its exceptional citizens, reviling their lack of
conformity and mechanical ineptitude as unpardonable evidence of their elitism. The ability to
perform this simple household chore becomes a test of one’s humanity, and those outcasts who
fail are immediately interned in the menagerie of buffoons that the light-bulb joke so mercilessly
pillories.
The joke singles out two contrasting groups in its role as an equal-opportunity leveler. On
the one hand, it ridicules bungling minorities whose spatulate fingers are ill equipped to handle
this fragile glass object, smashing the bulb with a hammer, cutting it in two with a chain saw or
getting drunk until the room spins. On the other hand, it is increasingly used to satirize
overeducated scientists who intellectualize a task that involves a mere twist of the wrist,
compiling libraries of software documentation or defining Darkness as a new industry standard.
Simultaneously snobbish and anti-elitist, the joke reflects an identity crisis occurring among
angry white males. Hemmed in from below by destitute ethnic groups and from above by incomprehensible aristocracies of white-collar intellectuals, the average citizen holds himself up as
the exemplar of common sense, which inevitably prevails over those who refuse to turn the bulb
without first completing the software upgrade and drawing up forbiddingly complex contracts
governing brown-outs or pratfalls.
The fact that a single joke is used to belittle the supposed deficiencies of minorities and
the esoteric skills of the intelligentsia suggests that, in some sense, we equate the tensions caused
by ethnic conflicts with the tensions caused by the new hierarchies of knowledge. Both ethnic
diversity and profound inequalities of information and know-how are contributing to social
unrest, to the demoralizing feelings of inadequacy and competitiveness that are tearing apart a
nation already fractured by intolerance. It is not an accident that the same joke is used to ridicule
the homeboy and the software designer; both are viewed with distrust as members of subversive
minorities.
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Light-Bulb Jokes: Charting an Era
One of the most surprising features of the light-bulb joke is how the lowly bulb has been
used to make fun of the exalted computer, spawning scores of light—bulb jokes about Silicon
Valley. (How many hardware engineers? Thirty - but of course just like years ago all it took was
a couple of kids in a garage in Palo Alto.) Far from streamlining the modern environment,
mechanization has made our lives more complex and has needlessly confused straightforward
tasks like setting the clocks on our VCR`s, paralyzing us with the cerebral intricacies of a chore it
has turned into an indecipherable electronic puzzle. The joke catches the machine age in the
nostalgic act of clarifying its original purpose—that of making things simpler, faster, easier to
use.
The light-bulb joke reflects another form of social unrest. In the not too distant past, it
was an uncensored forum for socially acceptable expressions of racism, homophobia, antiSemitism and misogyny. (How many feminists? Two - one to declare that the bulb has violated
the socket and one to secretly wish that she were the socket.) In the l990's, however, the joke is
being turned against its traditional tellers by a gang of comic vigilantes bent on evening the score.
It is a joke in turmoil, the battleground of a small civil war in which minorities, who for decades
remained in tight-lipped silence as loudmouthed Archie Bunkers taunted them in public, are now
talking back, lambasting such groups as homophobes, who change the bulb with sterile rubber
gloves because it is possible that a gay person with AIDS just touched it. The scapegoats have
been elevated from the butt of the joke to the joke tellers, a promotion that mirrors their
increasing integration into society. While very little has been done from 1879 to the age of the
politically incorrect to improve Edison`s invention, the light-bulb joke has been constantly
reinvented.