Morning Commute Thought

[moon_custafer]

Is “stealing a traffic cone and taking it home” the direct replacement for “putting a lampshade on your head” as the trope for indicating that a Very Good Time was/is being had? They both have that feeling of performative drunken zaniness. OTOH, I think of the traffic cone as more of a UK and the lampshade as a North American thing; also the milieu is house-party vs. evening out bar-hopping with your mates— but that may simply reflect a shift in how and where social drinking happens. 

I haven’t seen the lampshade thing referenced in at least twenty years, except in the deliberately retro work of Shaggy or Ape Man or whatever he’s calling himself these days, but (thinks) it’s a present-tense way of indicating you’re tipsy, isn't it? You're doing it to amuse/annoy your fellow guests, and you leave the lampshade at your host’s house at the end of the evening. By contrast, traffic-cone stealing is more like bringing home <i>proof</i> of your evening out, even/especially if the only audience is your hungover self the next morning.

I might have my Hallowe'en costume sorted.

Comments

[sovay]

though one person claimed to have seen an example in the wild and that it really was hilarious at the time.

I wonder if it was ever not ironic.

[moon_custafer]

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.