Yes, it's a joke about electrons and centrifugal force.
That said, it is interesting to observe that the speed that the electrons travel in a wire is far, far less than the speed of light. It actually works out to somewhere on the order of ten feet per hour, depending on the wire size and current and so forth. (This is the "electron drift speed".) The speed of voltage propagation is, of course, very much faster, nearly the speed of light.
Similarly, with a water pipe, you can open the valve at one end and have the pressure change at the other almost immediately, even though it can take the water a comparatively long time to run the length of the pipe.
