And God said, ’Let there be light’ and there was light, but the Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected.

Spike Milligan (1918–2002), the Irish-born British comedian and writer best known for co-creating the anarchic radio series *The Goon Show*, often satirized modern bureaucracy by colliding it with grand or sacred subjects. This quip riffs on Genesis (“Let there be light”) and then undercuts divine omnipotence with the petty delays of a public utility—an everyday frustration in postwar Britain, where dealing with boards, offices, and waiting lists became a staple of comic complaint. The line circulates widely in quotation collections as a characteristic Milligan one-liner, though it is frequently repeated without a reliably cited first publication or broadcast context.

The joke depends on anticlimax and incongruity: creation itself is instantaneous, yet a modern electricity authority can still impose a timetable. Milligan uses the sacred register to heighten the absurdity of bureaucratic power, suggesting that institutions meant to serve the public can feel like they outrank even common sense. The humor also points to a modern dependency: “light” is no longer purely a natural or divine phenomenon but something mediated by infrastructure, permissions, and schedules. In a single sentence, Milligan turns a foundational myth into a satire of administrative delay and the small humiliations of everyday life.