"I left Cleveland to get away from His and Her towels, people who call cocktail parties 'pours' and the guy who always breaks it up by wearing a lampshade on his head."
-Time Magazine article on actor Jim Backus, December 15, 1958.
Not to be confused with
Lampshade Hanging, this is simply a person getting drunk enough at a party to wear a lampshade as a hat.
It's hard to pin down the origin of this trope. One theory is that the guys get drunk enough to mistake lamps for hat racks. If that's true, this trope could be
Older Than Television. Another theory is a citation on
this web page
, the idea of a drunk wearing a lampshade goes back to at least 1958 in the U.S. (
Another article dates it to 1928.) It has also been suggested that this originated as a piece of "dirty" physical comedy: the man puts on the lamp-shade, exposes himself, and asks for someone to "turn him on" using his "switch".
Regardless, the cliche nature of it has turned it into a
Dead Horse Trope. It's uncommon to find examples nowadays that aren't parodies of this.
Japanese salarymen will instead take off their tie and wrap it around their head like a
Hachimaki.
Sometimes the lampshade wearer will say that
they're feeling light-headed.
The same effect is sometimes achieved with a traffic cone, though in reality they tend to be too wide and heavy to be practical as headwear.
Note, there is another reason you may see someone with a lampshade on their head: the
Rule Of Funny use as a
Paper Thin Disguise, in order to pretend to be a lamp. This has nothing to do with being drunk.
Examples:
- Fred Flintstone
- Homer Simpson
- Penny Arcade at least once.
- Pintsize in Questionable Content
- A Far Side cartoon with three teenagers on a couch, surveying a living room which they have obviously carefully tidied, moments before the parents come home... "Play it cool," says one, "they'll never know we've been partying." The deception would be perfect if they were not all three wearing lampshades.
- It's definitely appeared in a few different Garfield strips.
- In Peanuts, Snoopy and Spike have worn lampshades on a couple of occasions.
- In M*A*S*H, when Winchester thought he had an accidental marriage, there are pictures (which the audience never sees) of him doing just this.
- Father Goose - a movie about a commander having to take care of a school teacher and her students had a scene in which the teacher accidentally got drunk because of a mistaken belief she was bitten by a snake (long story). He lead the rather prim woman to believe she did dance naked with a lampshade on her head.
- Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants comes home in one when he arrives home at midnight saying, "That was some party!" when he was supposed to come home earlier and help Spongebob with the baby scallop/clam (long story).
- Oddly enough, in "The Bully", SQUIDWARD wore one of these... TWICE.
- Gary also does it in another episode, and Sponge Bob is still able to pull the chain attached to the shade and turn off the light.
- Kinda played with in this◊ Threadless t-shirt design involving various major figures in communism having a party.
- Lords and Ladies puts it in an interesting context:
"There are no delusions for the dead. Dying is like waking up after a really good party, when you have one or two seconds of innocent freedom before you recollect all the things you did last night which seemed so logical and hilarious at the time, and then you remember the really amazing thing you did with a lampshade and two balloons, which had them in stitches, and now realize you're going to have to look a lot of people in the eye today and you're sober now and so are they but you can both remember."
- In one Freakazoid episode, the villains are at a party for Freakazoid's imminent doom. Invisibo wears a lampshade so you can tell where he is.
- An episode of Feral TV involved the cast having acquired a large stash of lampshades, which they naturally put on their heads and used as 'helmets' for a Power Rangers spoof.
- The Person Formerly Known as Taro Sekiutsu in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei sold his name to an immigrant, and now lives in a cardboard box in the streets, wearing a lampshade as a mask.
- On the late-60s Looney Tunes short "Norman Normal" there's a character who wears a lampshade while droningly saying "Approval" over and over.
- One of the drunken cats in "Trap Happy Porky," belting out "On Moonlight Bay" (natch) also wears a lampshade.
- Spanky Ham from Drawn Together, in the first episode.
- Family Guy once featured a passed out Brian with a lampshade on his crotch because Stewie got tired of the sight of his splayed open legs. Does this count as an physical inversion? This troper wants to believe it is.
- Subverted in this Loserz comic.
- Father Ted wears a lampshade in one episode - not out of drunkenness, but to impersonate a stereotypical Chinaman. (How was he to know that there were three Chinese people observing him through the window?)
- Bun-Bun in this Sluggy Freelance strip.
- In Aladdin, Genie turns himself into a lampshade over Al's head for the line "A girl appreciates a man who can make her laugh."
- Referenced in Mythbusters:
Adam: (to Jamie) I know I'm drunk, but I can't even remotely tell that you're drunk. It's kind of annoying. I want to see you put a lampshade on your head or something.
- Keychain Of Creation used this once.
- The Doctor does the "tie wrapped around the head" variant to feign being drunk in "The Girl in the Fireplace."
- In this drawing of the Communist Party, Karl Marx wears a lampshade.
- Saints Row 2 has a lampshade wearable as a hat. Drunkenness is optional.
- ''In The Sims 2, sims with a Pleasure aspiration will put on lampshades and start dancing (wasting your time and theirs) if you don't keep their aspiration level high enough.
- One episode of Xiaolin Showdown involves the Ring of Nine Dragons, which spits a person into up to nine copies of themself, unfortunately also dividing intelligence among them. When Jack Spicer gets his hands on it, we see one of his clones with a lampshade on his head.
