There must once have been some ur-drunk who either was so sozzled he actually mistook a lamp for the hat rack, or who tried to imitate some vaudeville/silent movie sketch where Chaplin hid by disguising himself as a lamp, or who just thought he’d look cool in one of those shades with the decorative fringe.

Some have said it could also have been part of a suggestive “play with my light switch” joke, but that assumes the light switches of the day were the modern kind with a little phallic lever, and the older houses I’ve lived in had switches that looked like two circular buttons one above the other.