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The Dubious Art of the Dad Joke
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- PaulHoule 4y agoDo 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?) (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.)
- waynesonfire 4y ago"unfair" ability? such victim mentality. lol, you're so entitled. and Musk was bossing you around before he whas middle-aged.
- PaulHoule 4y agoI dunno. 1000 years from now the last man will be breathing his last breath on Earth and will be thinking... We could have gotten to Mars, colonized Ceres, gotten to Alpha Centuri a long time ago, but Elon Musk just had to post that stupid tweet...
- oh_sigh 4y agoI'm really sorry to hear that a dead pedophile is bullying you. Is he haunting your dreams?
- bachmeier 4y ago> Do we have to make the average middle-aged man into a buffoon I think we mostly do that to ourselves.
- bcrosby95 4y agoInteracting with my kids is a good opportunity to lighten up and be silly. I certainly can't wear my bosses pants on my head.
- bena 4y agoI think I speak for a large majority of people here when I say: What?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Kaibeezy 4y agoMy current torture device: Someone glued my deck of cards together and I just can’t deal with it!
- incomingpain 4y agoI've heard all the dad jokes, I present you with this one: 1
- JakDrako 4y agoNow I wish this site was Hacker Noose.
- plasticchris 4y agoI’ll add another one: 2
- jawns 4y agoMy kids have a habit of shouting, "Dad joke!" whenever I make a groaner. 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."
- tantalor 4y agoI don't get it?
- lmkg 4y agoIf a dad joke isn't funny, a dad will keep telling the joke until it becomes funny. This will eventually happen. In the limit, the act of telling the joke becomes the actual source of humor. 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.
- conductr 4y agoAs a dad, these are the best dad jokes. Only beat by when you set it up so well, your kid tells the joke back at you at a moment that contextually makes perfect sense. That’s pure gold.
- _carbyau_ 4y agoAlong similar lines, my somewhat short friend deliberately nicknamed his kid Shorty because he knew the kid would be much taller one day. Years of setup with the rest of his life for the reward.
- themadturk 4y agoAs a dad (who tells dad jokes), she's illustrating the fact that nothing stops us from telling dad jokes. We are relentless. "Hi, Relentless. I'm Dad."
- blowski 4y agoAs 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.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoWhere does a cat go after it exhausts its nine lives? Purr-gatory.
- adolph 4y agoWhat do pirates put in their salad? Arrr-ugula!
- kuang_eleven 4y agoAlso works in Spanish!
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoEven better in Spanish, because you also get "gato" in there.
- anbende 4y ago> 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. 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.
- wolverine876 4y agoMy 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: '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'
- drchiu 4y agoYes, definitely. One either graduates to being able to not take oneself seriously (ie. by telling embarrassing and not-mean jokes, and sometimes being on the receiving end of one) or not. I'd like to think dad jokes are a good thing.
- dwringer 4y agoThere is a lot of overlap but plenty of self-deprecating jokes are way too blue to be considered "dad jokes". Still I think you're right and that's just a variation of the same thing. Just... "adult" dad jokes. Makes me think of watching podcasts with people like the late greats Norm Macdonald, Gilbert Gottfried, and Bob Saget.
- lmkg 4y agoNSFW dad jokes are called uncle jokes.
- aidenn0 4y ago> Is it really only dads who can tell dad jokes? If you're not a dad and tell a dad joke, then you're a faux pa.
- quercusa 4y agoConcise, on point, unexpected - a perfect specimen.
- mmmpop 4y agoWow, just how long have you been hanging onto that one?
- aidenn0 4y agoMaybe 2 or 3 years? It's just a bummer I heard it after becoming a dad, because I've had an unending love for bad humor as long as I can remember.
- Cerium 4y agoI have enjoyed that one for a while. My wife and I are expecting that I will give up that joke in a few weeks for the same reason.
- aidenn0 4y agoCongratulations? (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).
- hluska 4y agoHahahahaha, I relate. I want to say ‘congratulations’ but also want to say “holy shit, welcome to an 18 month long hangover.” :)
- zajio1am 4y agoFor 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.
- lmkg 4y agoIt's a certain type of pun. Not all puns are dad jokes. Dad jokes are viewed negatively because they tend to be one-beat, shallow puns. Ones that could be understood by a six-year-old, so when your dad is still telling them when you're ten years old (or twenty), you roll your eyes.
- wink 4y agoI think the problem is judging them. Some might find them shallow and some might find them clever. Or maybe it's people shouting "dad joke" at every pun anyway.
- brimble 4y agoI'd never heard the term until a few years ago. They were just bad puns before that.
- 4y ago
- motohagiography 4y agoI 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. 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.
- dkarl 4y ago> 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 reality. An inability to make Dad jokes would be an example of that. 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.
- Tomte 4y agoI like this explanation of the dad joke: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/25x850/the_new_father/chlq6ko/?context=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/25x850/the_new_fathe... 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."
- Tade0 4y agoAs a father of a one year old I think a large component of all this is sleep deprivation.
- ineedasername 4y agoThese are also known as "Uncle Jokes". 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.
- klyrs 4y agoYeah, the article mentions that towards the bottom, with some generalization about women telling funny stories rather than "jokes". In my family, my mom was always the "straight man" and my dad, his sisters and her sister and mom all told terrible puns/jokes; where my uncles on his side were practically humorless. Gender tropes are weird.
- _carbyau_ 4y agoYeah, my wife has a memory to be able to reel them off for 20 minutes. I can barely recall one when I want it. But I am the one who sees an opportunity and improvises on the spot more successfully.
- yccs27 4y agoI've heard "Uncle Jokes" as a term for dad jokes with an uncomfortable subject (NSFW or otherwise).
- ineedasername 4y agoThat's an interesting twist, I wasn't aware. To be honest, I don't have the most reliable source: I heard the term "uncle Jokes" first from an episode of Teen Titans Go [1], which my kids love. Also after you watch a few episodes it grows on you as a pretty good bit of satire. Or I'm suffering Stockholm Syndrome. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DCz9WpuIcUPk&ved=2ahUKEwiMl5PAzqf3AhWfkYkEHT0YCpAQwqsBegQIEBAF&usg=AOvVaw2qwMk1xSfK7PmIsjGIoszx https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DCz9WpuIcUPk&ved=2ahUKEwiMl...
- xwdv 4y agoYou 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. 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.
- lupire 4y agoThe article seems to fail to distinguish between "dad jokes" and "jokes for kids". 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.
- jacobkg 4y agoMy take on the Dad joke: 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
- nonameiguess 4y agoI don't know about that, man. I think it's just men over 35 or so no matter what. I'm 41 with no kids and love dad jokes, not to try and rekindle the feeling of feedback from a 4 year-old since I haven't regularly interacted with 4 year-olds since I was a 4 year-old myself.
- historia_novae 4y agoI'm now at the age where puns are dad jokes because it's my dad laughing to them. It was pretty satisfaying few days ago when he was yelling "vos gueules" (shut up) at birds, to which I said "That why they're called Vogel in German", and made him laugh out loud.
- ziml77 4y agoI'm 30 and I love dad jokes. And I hate them at the exact same time. Like I'll hate that the person said it and want to bop them over the head, but I will also chuckle or smile at the bad joke. I love getting that same sort of pained but happy feedback from others which is why I will tell them myself.
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- adolph 4y agoWhat 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. [...] 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 https://github.com/cmusphinx/cmudict 1. https://blog.paperspace.com/measuring-text-similarity-using-levenshtein-distance/ https://blog.paperspace.com/measuring-text-similarity-using-...
- m463 4y agoThis thread has given me so much new material. (lol)
- bradwood 4y agoYeah. Very funny. So, is AWS Eventbridge any good for event sourcing? ;)
- reaperducer 4y agoIf you like dad jokes, Siri is full of them, and they seem to be updated weekly or monthly. 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.
- wly_cdgr 4y agoThere's only two kinds of jokes in this world, kid: dad jokes, and bad jokes
- anonymousDan 4y agoI literally told that brown and sticky joke to my 3 year old this morning and he loved it!
- rufus_foreman 4y agoComedy is not pretty. In general, for most people, the thing that is funniest is someone else's pain. 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.
- bigmattystyles 4y agoThe 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.
- humanrebar 4y agoLots of good comments here, but nobody has really pointed out the next level of metahumor in a dad 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.
- eek2121 4y agoMy favorite dad jokes were told by women. Just saying...
- tlavoie 4y agoWhen 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.
- wink 4y agoAs 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. 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).
- listless 4y agoAn article on dad jokes that manages to include a reference to a “racist”. This stuff makes me roll my eyes and I wonder why? 5 years ago I don’t think I would have batted an eye.
- mgalgs 4y agoVirtue signaling fatigue... Many of us are feeling it.