Lightbulb joke
jokes of the form "How many does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"
A lightbulb joke is a joke cycle that asks how many people of a certain group are needed to change, replace, or screw in a light bulb. Generally, the punch line answer highlights a stereotype of the target group. There are numerous versions of the lightbulb joke satirizing a wide range of cultures, beliefs, and occupations.
Early versions of the joke, popular in the late 1960s and the 1970s, were used to insult the intelligence of people, especially Poles ("Polish jokes"). Such jokes generally take the form of:
Although lightbulb jokes tend to be derogatory in tone (e.g., "How many drunkards..." / "Four: one to hold the light bulb and three to drink until the room spins"), the people targeted by them may take pride in the stereotypes expressed and are often themselves the jokes' originators.
Lightbulb jokes applied to subgroups can be used to ease tensions between them.
Variations
Some versions of the joke are puns on the words "change" or "screw".
Lightbulb jokes are often responses to contemporary events.
For example, the lightbulb may not need to be changed at all due to ongoing power outages.
The Village Voice held a $200 lightbulb joke contest around the time of the Iran hostage crisis, with the winning joke being:
References
Notes
Alan Dundes (1981).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Lightbulb joke” as jokes of the form "How many does it take to screw in a lightbulb?". Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2915058. The Library of Congress control number is sh97008351. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lightbulb joke” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.