The Dubious Art of the Dad Joke
daily.jstor.org
daily.jstor.org
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:
-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
- 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.
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.
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
I love getting that same sort of pained but happy feedback from others which is why I will tell them myself.
The gist is that humor is the "joy of debugging". Our brains are inference machines and make a lot of conclusions that might eventually end up being incorrect. If we didn't have a joy-bringing mechanism in our brains to clean up the erroneous cruft we would less-likely perform this important maintenance.
After a long road trip when they're farking around in the back of the car I'll start throwing down some dad jokes. They soon plead for me to stop.
There's something agonizing about processing a good Dad joke, it's now become torture for them. The deeper and more twisted the pun the better.
Maybe I'm about to reach Peak Dad?
Kid: I'm hungry. Dad: Hi Hungry, I'm Dad. Kid: Stop it! Dad: Stop what? Kid: Why do you always do that? Dad: Because I love you. Kid: Seriously Dad, I'm hungry. Dad: And I'm seriously Dad.
- Dad’s prior sense of humor may have included puns and groan jokes, but they were intermingled with a plethora of sailor-blushing cursing, gallows humor, and innuendo that’s not a great idea to sling around in front of a three-year-old. Dad jokes aren’t just what’s added; they’re what’s left when much is culled away.
'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.
'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.
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'
I'd like to think dad jokes are a good thing.
knock knock … porcupine who? Porcupine bulldozer - makes no sense why those things belong together and that’s what makes it funny. Then we’ll laugh and he'll ask me knock knock and come up with something just as ridiculous.
For me, it’s totally a bonding experience. I get to see what makes him laugh. Try to stump him. Sometimes come up with one spontaneously that surprises him. And generally, be my kids best friend at this age.
I’m also a serious adult. I don’t joke around with my friends like I did in my youth. My hangout sessions with friends are all calendared weeks/months ahead. I have friends, we joke, but it’s different and not side splitting type jokes; more like chuckles. Before my son, I couldn’t tell you how long it had been since I laughed to tears (10+ years probably). So this helps me rediscover my humor, bond with a kid like I did when I was a kid when I built my strongest friendships and relive my youth in a way.
I’m in 40s with a 3 year old kid and what I don’t quite understand is, don’t dads of all ages do this? Is it really a 35+ thing? Or is that because when the kid is a teen is when they start thinking dad jokes are cringeworthy instead of funny.
I see adults do that, but I don't understand it. To me, 'serious' means having consequential responsibilities, prioritizing them, and reliably delivering on them. That doesn't rule out side-splitting laughs when it doesn't interfere with the responsibilities, does it?
If this implies you are not yet an adult or a young adult, it may also explain why you do not understand it (no offense meant just pointing out it may be a lack of perspective).
I suppose I mean "serious" as in my demeanor and general attitude is mostly tied up in those things like responsibilities and the deadlines and conversing about business, world events, catching up, etc instead of all the free time, lack of responsibility, and ensuing shenanigan's that comes with youth [my youth]. As you age you slowly accrue more and more "responsibility" such that it's difficult to even get in the right headspace, company, and context that would even present a side-splitting laugh situation. It's not that I was overly stoic. I laughed, hard even, but not where I couldn't breath or I was literally rolling on the floor.
It's not that I somehow lost the ability but it's like if you stop working out because the new job is too busy or you are spending all your free time caring for a household/relative. Your health probably doesn't decline a ton in the initial months or even year. But fast forward 10 years and you find that not only did you not work out, but you also let your diet slip, and maybe accrued some weight. Sure you can visit the gym, you didn't forget how to work out, but you lost the habit and you have to work a bit harder to get back what you once had.
Also, with the demands of time, I (mostly) cut out unhealthy coping and relaxation and replaced it with healthy things I love - e.g., someone might cut out drinking and replace it with bicycle riding, if they like it. I define 'unhealthy' by asking, 'will I feel better when I'm done with this activity than when I started?' It took awhile to find healthy activities I love, but that was just a matter of exploring options, which was healthy and enjoyable itself. There's just no time for the unhealthy stuff.
Finally, I felt I wasn't cognitively as flexible as I used to be, and I watched what flexible young people do (and studied other sources), and made sure that 'me time', and other activities when possible, includes exploration - following my nose or my passion, without a defined destination. That also has made an enormous difference.
Others' mileage will vary, but I hope that helps someone!
Apparently when the older of my two brothers was fairly young, he would tell knock-knock jokes where the punchline was always the phrase "smashed into toothpaste". "Knock knock!" "Who's there?" "Elephant?" "Elephant who?" Elephant _smashed into toothpaste_!" My parents weren't sure exactly what he meant by that (maybe he heard about something being "ground into a paste" and assumed that toothpaste was made in the same way?), but it became a family in-joke, and even though he had stopped by the time I was old enough to converse, I'm still just as familiar with the form.
A similar family meme came from my dad playing a basic word game with my older brothers once when I happened to be present as a toddler. My dad would prompt them in the form of "one <X:singular>", and they were supposed to respond with "two <X:plural>", like "one sheep...?" "two sheep" or "one ox...?" "two oxen!" Not understanding the pattern, I interjected at one point with one of my own: "one juice, two lava!" To this day, none of us are quite sure what I meant by this (including me!), but it was memorable enough that it's the only part of this game that we remember.
If you're not a dad and tell a dad joke, then you're a faux pa.
(You can always tell when a parent is congratulating you as there is that lilt on the end that signifies they aren't certain that having to take care of an infant is an event definitely worth congratulating).
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think dad jokes relate to masculinity that way. I think they are more a display of non-masculinity from someone who is expected to be masculine. In a way they reflect the softening of masculinity that comes with turning your attention away from masculine achievement and towards nurturing. You get less prideful and more goofy; less tuned into adult reality and more tuned into kid reality. Instead of trying to be the most grown up grown-up in the room, you embrace childish thinking so you can meet your kids where they are, and you have so much fun that you decide to keep visiting, say, six-year-old logic even years after your kids have grown out of it. I think that's why people find dad jokes endearing, because they show someone violating the norms of adult (and masculine) dignity for the sake of making their family smile. Unlike other humor, a dad joke doesn't demonstrate intelligence, social dominance, or even much social acuity.
The other day, my wife made a great pun, and my son said, "Dad joke!"
"No, it's a mom joke," she clarified. Then she educated them.
"There are two differences between dad jokes and mom jokes. Number one, I'm a mom, not a dad, so I tell mom jokes."
"What's the other difference?" a kid asked.
"Number two," she sighed, looking in my direction. "Dad jokes are relentless."
This type of meta-humor takes some age and maturity to understand. A dedicated dad will tell the same joke for years, waiting for the child to become old enough to appreciate it.
"Hi, Relentless. I'm Dad."
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."
[...]
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.”
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.
0. https://github.com/cmusphinx/cmudict
1. https://blog.paperspace.com/measuring-text-similarity-using-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 and delightful please.
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.
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.
But I am the one who sees an opportunity and improvises on the spot more successfully.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DCz9WpuIcUPk&ved=2ahUKEwiMl...
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.
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).
Both my children (almost teens now) have only lived in the USA, and they yell "dad-joke" at any attempted humor that fails to make them laugh. On my part they're mostly sarcastic remarks veiled as a joke to keep the conversation pleasant or makes a fun one more interesting, by showing my participation. Sometimes I also initiate it because I simply want to bond with them but I don't know how to talk like their age. I don't want conversations to be too serious.
I guess, my ultimate motive is to bond with them with humor but I have to choose ones that isn't too confrontational, aggressive or other negative connotations. I pick these almost silly bad ones on purpose because they're light-hearted, they have been used it since they were very small and I really don't feel the need to be perfect around them, they're too young for me. Lately I have also been thinking that maybe I do want them the opportunity to laugh at me, instead of seeing me as authoritative, all the time.
In the culture I grew up in fathers were supposed to be quite strict so even talking to them was a big deal so jokes were rare. Even then we used talk about silly things our old men did, on rare ocassions in front of them so the last one might be a big part of it.
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.
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.
Just say, "Siri, tell me a joke." I do this four or five times before I go to bed.
I don't know why. It's just a habit.
This stuff makes me roll my eyes and I wonder why? 5 years ago I don’t think I would have batted an eye.
Purr-gatory.
Arrr-ugula!
(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.)
I think we mostly do that to ourselves.
I certainly can't wear my bosses pants on my head.
What?