Lightbulb

Title: Lightbulb

General Information about Item:

Informant Data:

Contextual Data:

Social Context
- - The joke was collected on November 6th, 2017. Andy encountered this joke on the internet. This joke is very accessible since it does not require any specific computer science knowledge, and would be shared between programmers and non-programmers alike.

Cultural Context
- - As much as programmers might know about software, they might not know much about the hardware that their work depends on (CPUs, power sources, RAM). The theme of self-deprecation runs strong in computer science folklore, as all computer scientists have, at one time or another, experienced hardware failure and being at the mercy of the aptly named tech support specialists. In this joke, the stereotype of programmers delegating all hardware problems elsewhere is comically hyperbolized so that no number of programmers will be of use even for a task as simple as changing a lightbulb. The joke and stereotype are common enough that this dig at programmers can be easily understood by non-programmers as well.

Item:

Transcript:

Stephanie: What is your name and background?
Andy: My name is Andy Yoon, and I’m a ’19 at Dartmouth. I major in Computer Science.
Stephanie: Can you tell me the joke that you have?
Andy: Okay. Question, how many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? And the answer is none, because that’s a hardware problem! Yay!
Stephanie: Can you tell me where you first heard this joke and uh, what circumstances you heard it in?
Andy: I was just like surfing through the net, and I found it.
Stephanie: And can you explain why it’s funny?
Andy: So it’s supposed to be funny because programmers — I mean a lightbulb is a hardware, but programmers write code on software, so they’re like technically different—different things, so they can’t solve the problem.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Collector’s Name: Stephanie Guo

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Dartmouth Folklore Archive