Variations
Many versions of the joke are puns on the words "change" or "screw":
- Q. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
- A. One–but the light bulb has to really want to change.
- Q. How many mice does it take to screw in a light bulb?
- A. Two. The hard part's getting them in there.
Lightbulb jokes may be responses to current events, particularly those related to energy and political power. For example, the lightbulb may not 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:
- Q. How many Iranians does it take to change a light bulb?
- A. You send us the prize money and we'll tell you the answer.
The humor of lightbulb jokes has been the subject of academic studies, and has been used to advertise various fields of interest.
During the start of the 2012 Worldwide Developers' Conference (WWDC) held in San Francisco, the question "How many iOS developers are needed to change a lightbulb?" was asked to Siri, to which it responded, "None, that is a hardware problem."
Read more about this topic: Lightbulb Joke
Famous quotes containing the word variations:
“I may be able to spot arrowheads on the desert but a refrigerator is a jungle in which I am easily lost. My wife, however, will unerringly point out that the cheese or the leftover roast is hiding right in front of my eyes. Hundreds of such experiences convince me that men and women often inhabit quite different visual worlds. These are differences which cannot be attributed to variations in visual acuity. Man and women simply have learned to use their eyes in very different ways.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)