My take on the Dad joke:<p>A “Dad” joke is usually characterized by relying heavily on dumb puns and wordplay. I now believe that this is not because Dads inherently like puns but rather that two aspects of child development happen to coincide, namely:<p>-Between ages 2 and 6 or so children often develop the ability to giggle uncontrollably in a way that is so utterly endearing that it practically takes your breathe away. It’s incredible and addicting and pure and wholesome and wonderful. But you have to work for it because with their rapidly growing, novelty seeking brains they rarely explode with giggles at the same thing twice<p>- At the same age the child is learning language and acquiring vocabulary. I believe that this leads to them especially enjoying puns and silly wordplay, because it connects so well with what they are spending an enormous amount of brainpower focused on.<p>The enormous positive feedback loop of sometimes being rewarded with joyous laughter in response to low-brow wordplay rewires the Dad’s brain. The kid will grow out of this but some Dads spend the rest of their lives chasing the Dragon.<p>So, when a Dad tells a “Dad joke”, they are really trying to rekindle those giggles from when you (or their child) was 4 and found nothing more hilarious than words
My unfounded theory: As with most miscommunication and conflict, the 'conflict' between 'dad' joke tellers and youthful audience is because the two parties are using the same thing (jokes) for different purposes. To describe people very, very generally:<p>'Youth' are displaying their social capacity - their humor, their communication ability, their ability to navigate social situations, their ability to play, etc. They are trying to show how clever they can be in order to attract others, and maybe due to living in competitive social situations (school). The level of funny and socially cleverness is the whole point. The audience is trying to find fault, to a degree.<p>'Dads' and older adults of all types are trying to bond and model loving behavior, especially with the youth with whom the older adults are rarely competing. The audience is presumed to be trying to bond too - they are trying to find the love and enjoyment. A dumb joke adds to the humor, because now the teller becomes a target of laughter, and models vulnerability and trust.<p>When the 'dad' tells a dumb joke, the two parties understand it completely differently. One thinks or says, 'Oh my god, that's so embarrassing!'. The other thinks, 'Yes, you get it! :D'
As a Dad of an 8 year old, I bond a lot with my son through humour. I need a repository of inoffensive jokes that don’t require much understanding. That’s why I tell Dad jokes.
> No longer distant, traditional patriarchal father figures, dads can use jokes to bond and interact with their children, using simple humor that is most often appreciated by children earlier on in their development.<p>I think this is a big part of it, and I've heard this before. Parents use very simplistic humor with their kids, because more sophisticated humor or humor with adult themes isn't appropriate. Over time this becomes the habit for the parent, so they keep doing it even as the children age out of it.
I think jokes ground us to reality by interrupting the logic of ideas. The effects of people spinning and iterating on ideas without having them reconciled to humor or truth are pretty obvious. A great example is emo/goth kids (I was one) who construct and live-by the rules of a narrative fantasy governed by how well it reinforces an (aesthetic) filter on our reflection of self. We were pretty much the poster children for absent and unfunny fathers.<p>Also, laughter is involuntary. I take humor very seriously because all humor implies the necessary existence of truth, where every joke is a kind of figure/ground relationship against it. Dad jokes are an essential education that uses paradox and collisions in language to demonstrate to kids there is a self and experience moored to truth that is separate from the artifacts of language and narrative. Our self and ego also speak in language, and if there's one thing dads do, it's moderate your ego.<p>The link between humor and aggression in the article is interesting, especially because a father who lacks a certain level of natual masculine aggression is going to be percieved as insufficiently powerful, competent, or trustworthy, or lacking in the credibility to help ground a kids personality and identity to fixtures of truth and reality. An inability to make Dad jokes could be an example of that.<p>Personally, my pet theory is language begins mainly as a tool for mothers to keep their children safe, so the axioms of it are almost all necessarily negative, as it's initially used to warn of danger or disgust and shame, whereas love and affection are expressed physically. However, it means the self that is an artifact of language is also rooted in those things unless some dad shows you the limits of them and of how seriously you should take your narrative self.<p>When we think of a toxic male, it usually means is he is a shameless bro who doesn't respond to expressions of disgust or threats of witholding approval, and he usually learned it from another man, usually his father, who was probably pretty funny as well. If you pay attention, Dad jokes diffuse neuroticism, anxiety, shame, and the remnants of the levers for those necessary warnings we got as toddlers and are arguably necessary to us develop as men and women.
My kids have a habit of shouting, "Dad joke!" whenever I make a groaner.<p>The other day, my wife made a great pun, and my son said, "Dad joke!"<p>"No, it's a mom joke," she clarified. Then she educated them.<p>"There are two differences between dad jokes and mom jokes. Number one, I'm a mom, not a dad, so I tell mom jokes."<p>"What's the other difference?" a kid asked.<p>"Number two," she sighed, looking in my direction. "Dad jokes are relentless."
I like this explanation of the dad joke: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/25x850/the_new_father/chlq6ko/?context=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/25x850/the_new_fathe...</a><p>Especially this: "I need to be careful about jokes that are biting or sarcastic humor. I don't want them to see me being mean to others."
<i>What makes a thing funny? At its core, humor seems to be all about incongruity. Comic situations set up a context where something is marked or out of place. This oddness, far different to what we were led to expect or what we blithely assume is normal, is what makes things funny.</i><p>[...]<p><i>Dad jokes play with incongruity largely through linguistics and wordplay, rather than subject matter. The much-maligned pun is a mainstay of the dad joke. Puns, bad or good, have long fascinated researchers for their playful ability to tell a micro mystery, with its red herring clues in plain sight. . . . Through a trick of linguistics, words cleverly disguised like other words because of the way they sound or their different semantic senses can lead us in the wrong direction of meaning resolution, before we “get it.”</i><p>After recently making a dad-joke ("Why does the string section have so much security? Because of all the viol[ins|ence].") I started a project to map the CMUdict phonemes [0] by Levenshtein distance in order to gather more word sets that are not precisely homophones for more jokes. The "Dubious Art" article was a top read from my literature review.<p>0. <a href="https://github.com/cmusphinx/cmudict" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cmusphinx/cmudict</a><p>1. <a href="https://blog.paperspace.com/measuring-text-similarity-using-levenshtein-distance/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.paperspace.com/measuring-text-similarity-using-...</a>
The article seems to fail to distinguish between "dad jokes" and "jokes for kids".<p>One of the main factors is that a "dad joke" is inserted in real conversation (Hi Hungry, I'm Dad", or an observational pun), whereas if it's set up as a fictional story ("at a funeral a man says 'May I offer you a word of comfort? Plethora'"), it's just a (kids) joke.
Lots of good comments here, but nobody has really pointed out the next level of metahumor in a dad joke.<p>All humor is based on something unexpected. In a good pun, the wordplay is clever and unexpected. In a good punchline, the particular completion of a setup is unexpected.<p>Sometime a dad joke is funny because telling a joke that awful is itself unexpected! It's sort of a metajoke that someone would even try to tell that joke. And the joke self-deprecating at the same time because there's real risk the audience won't even get that telling the joke is the joke.<p>The best example of the bad joke metajoke was the Norm MacDonald roast of Bob Saget. If you know anything about roast comedy, his set was a work of comedy genius. Someone out of the loop might think Norm was just lame, but he was really doing something clever with top notch delivery.<p>There is a nice synergy with the above when young children are involved. Those aspects (teaching, it's new to them, they just want to share a laugh) are there still even with the metajoke hanging out there for the grownups in the room to (hopefully) appreciate. I'll also add that it's good to teach kids not to take the adults too seriously. Even kings get the toots, etc.<p>Anyway, all that being said, you can run even the bad joke metajoke into the ground, dads. At some point it stops being meta and self-deprecating and just becomes G-rated cringe trolling. I think the best comics try to delight their audiences. Be funny <i>and</i> delightful please.
These are also known as "Uncle Jokes".<p>I guess moms & aunts either have different (better?) jokes, don't tell jokes, or tell these jokes too but haven't been singled out for it.<p>Anyway, as a father I realized some time ago that I do in fact tell dad jokes. I think it has to do (for me at least) with wanting to make it fun to have my kids to think about something from an unexpected angle.
As a non-native English speaker I've still not grasped why they're called dad jokes. It's not that we don't have them, but there's simply zero cultural connotation to them being related to dads and their kids. The meme doesn't even compute.<p>Which doesn't mean they're not revered or reviled to the same degree. Some people love them (I do) and some people always just roll their eyes.<p>Also I'm always relating them a bit to hip hop. I'm not a fan of the music but I am a fan of playing with the language and (ab)using some words in creative ways, so some bands who ace this I actually like. (German Blumentopf were a good example).
For me as a non-american, the concept od 'dad jokes' is totally alien. From perceived usage, it seems just as a different phrase for puns, with some negative association.
When I was a kid, my dad loved his dad jokes, especially terrible (great) puns. My mother attempted to enforce a, "puns only on Fridays" rule, that of course was never followed. Instead, every other day became an honorary Friday. We kids rolled with the laughs, and threw them right back. The tradition continues.
You know, I’m surprised the term “Dad Joke” has managed to survive this far in this day and age, and hasn’t been replaced by the term “Parent Joke” or something.<p>I’m surprised someone hasn’t complained that the term “Dad Joke” somehow perpetuates the stereotype that women, and mothers, cannot be funny, or are regarded as funny as male peers.
Comedy is not pretty. In general, for most people, the thing that is funniest is someone else's pain.<p>But that's not really something you want to introduce young children to, you want to protect them from something ugly for a while until they grow up. Which is a thing dads do, in my experience.
If you like dad jokes, Siri is full of them, and they seem to be updated weekly or monthly.<p>Just say, "Siri, tell me a joke." I do this four or five times before I go to bed.<p>I don't know why. It's just a habit.
The funny part about dad jokes is that I started making them sarcastically long before I had kids. So long before that I'm pretty sure I was making dad jokes in earnest before I was a dad.
An article on dad jokes that manages to include a reference to a “racist”.<p>This stuff makes me roll my eyes and I wonder why? 5 years ago I don’t think I would have batted an eye.
Do we have to make the average middle-aged man into a buffoon to make up for our discomfort that a handful of older men have the unfair ability to boss us around? (e.g. Jeff Epstein, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk?)<p>(The reality that a group of less than 0.01% of the has so much power over the rest of us causes us to blame "the 1% percent" or "top 10%" or "the patriarchy", etc.)