๐ฌ May the 4th — Woody Magazine, May. 4, 2026
Film
Today is May 4. The same pun is flooding social media again — "May the 4th be with you." Star Wars Day. A play on Obi-Wan's blessing, "May the Force be with you," so familiar by now that almost nobody bothers asking who said it first.
Almost no one did. Not George Lucas. Not a fan. The first recorded appearance of the joke in print sits in an unlikely place: the British general election of Thursday, May 3, 1979. Britain was just emerging from the "Winter of Discontent," a wave of public-sector strikes so severe that in some boroughs the dead had gone unburied. As ballots were still being counted, Margaret Thatcher was on her way to becoming Britain's first female prime minister. On page 13 of the London Evening News, the Conservative Party ran a half-page advertisement addressed to her: "May the Fourth Be with You, Maggie. Congratulations." That single line is the earliest known printed reference to "May the 4th."
The detail that makes the story sing isn't the date. It's the agency behind the ad: Saatchi & Saatchi, the same firm that had just produced "Labour Isn't Working" — the dole-queue poster widely credited with helping Thatcher into Downing Street, and voted by industry magazine Campaign in 1999 as the poster of the twentieth century. Labour's chancellor, Denis Healey, was furious.
"They're selling politics like soap powder."
— Denis Healey, Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1979So the same agency Healey accused of marketing democracy like a detergent ended up grafting a science-fiction punchline onto a moment of political triumph. Whether it was a deliberate cultural wink or simply a copywriter who'd been to see Star Wars the year before, the records don't say. What's certain is that, in the spring of 1979, someone inside that London office had been to the cinema.
The joke didn't catch on right away. It surfaced again in a 1988 episode of the British animated series Count Duckula, and once more in a 1994 House of Commons debate, but for decades it remained a niche pun. The unofficial holiday came from somewhere else entirely: in 2011, the Toronto Underground Cinema held what is credited as the first public Star Wars Day event. Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, and only then did the franchise itself begin to claim a tradition fans had quietly tended for over thirty years.
The order, in other words, runs like this. Politicians cracked the joke. Fans kept it alive. The studio arrived last. The lightsaber emojis crowding your timeline today trace back to a Tory Party advert in late-1970s London — a small footnote in how a one-line pun outlives its moment and becomes a ritual the whole world shares.
The thirty-year life of "May the 4th" — first cracked by politicians, kept alive by fans, finally claimed by the studio.
- 「source ↗」 Wikipedia — Star Wars Day
- 「source ↗」 Wikipedia — Labour Isn't Working
- 「source ↗」 Newsweek — How Margaret Thatcher Launched 'May the Fourth Be With You'
- 「source ↗」 Campaign — History of Advertising No 90: 'Labour isn't working'
- 「source ↗」 The Politics Shed — The Election of 1979
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