The Dubious Art of the Dad Joke
daily.jstor.orgMy 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
Dad here, I agree with all of the above with a caveat... my kids are now 9 and 11.
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?
100%. Once they've grown up a little bit, they recognize what you're doing; the game now changes from "how can I make this kid giggle" to "how can I make this (pre-)teenager roll their eyes" with the same joke?
This happens almost daily in my house. I get some kind of sick pleasure from annoying them.
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.
It's all about the end game content.
Honestly, I think that almost anything that would otherwise be interesting can become tiresome to people who experience it too much. I remember reading that the Red Sox manager, Alex Cora, would video call one of the Red Sox star players (Xander Bogaerts) to have him tell his kids to eat their vegetables when they were refusing, and it worked! The kids clearly were Red Sox fans who were impressed to hear from one of their favorite players, and yet, the fact that their dad was this player's boss was somehow not suitably impressive. No matter how impressive you might otherwise be to them if you were a stranger, it's hard to avoid being boring to your own kids.
One of my favorite books is Inside Jokes Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind.
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.
If I may append:
- 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.
I 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.
I'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.
I'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.
I'm 28 and have loved puns about as long as I can remember. No plans to have kids, but it turns out you can get almost anyone to groan, even adults!
The best is when they start making “dad” jokes of their own, back at you. I had no idea 4 or 5 year olds could do it but they can.
My kid got accused of being a little dad due to her mastery of the genre. I taught her well :)
Maybe you don't mean to suggest that all puns are "dumb?" For if you did someone would certainly shake a spear at you.
Hanging is too good for the man who uses puns - he should be drawn and quoted!
Building on your second point, kids at that age are also prone to verbal misunderstandings, many of which turn out to be hilarious. So turnabout is fair play.
Many years ago my father-in-law was concerned about the pressure I one of his tires. I told him not to worry because I had a tire gauge in my car and we could check it. My sister-in-law was three or four at the time and approached me wide-eyed and said incredulously "you have a tiger cage in your car? "
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:
'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'
This sounds quite familiar to my experience with my 3 year old. He tells jokes back to me that are just as absurd and we try to one up each other. Since he’s learned a good deal of vocabulary and matching and opposites, he finds things that unexpectedly clash hilarious
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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?
> I see adults do that, but I don't understand 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.
I see what you mean now and I've been there. FWIW, blocking out a little time for myself daily - e.g., early in the morning - has transformed me. Just a little time where I am the highest priority (obviously not true in extreme circumstances, but I mean have the discipline and seriousness to make it true 99% of the time) has made an enormous difference in my productivity and my ability to be close to loved ones. The loved ones are especially happy with the results.
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!
I like to laugh and still share side-splitting laughs with my friends, but I understand their point. There’s an entirely different level of laughter where my child is involved. She’s six now so I’m used to it but when she was little, I could truthfully say that I had never laughed so hard in my entire life. That’s not quite true - I have laughed that hard but the emotional side of parenting makes everything into a superlative.
Yes, 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.
There 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.
NSFW dad jokes are called uncle jokes.
What are you doing step uncle?
Don't.
I can only speak for myself, but I tell dad jokes 100% for the "Oh, my god, that's so embarrassing!" response, and really no other reason. The bigger the sigh / groan / more exaggerated the eye-roll, the better.
I'm not supposed to say this on HN, but you're a troll! ;)
Also, the child doesn't remember when they were younger and loved the joke.
> 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.
At this point in the discussion, I’m in the perfect position to testify that this is a fantastic dad joke – but no wonder: after all, it comes from my parent.
The best part of this joke is how the punchline slowly becomes a parent.
Concise, on point, unexpected - a perfect specimen.
I came to this thread for the Dad jokes.
Wow, just how long have you been hanging onto that one?
Maybe 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.
I 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.
Congratulations?
(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).
Hahahahaha, I relate. I want to say ‘congratulations’ but also want to say “holy shit, welcome to an 18 month long hangover.” :)
Thanks aidenn0 and hluska for the 'congratulations'. I think I know I'm in for a wild adventure, but I also know I don't know anything. :)
Which means you know all you need to know. Welcome to the ride.
Honestly friend, it’s intense but I wouldn’t change any of it for the entire world.
I think after toilet training that lilt tends to go away. Those first months are hard but it does get easier.
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.
I've heard all the dad jokes, I present you with this one:
1
Now I wish this site was Hacker Noose.
A good joke is all about the execution.
Don't leave us hanging, what did you wish it was before now?
I’ll add another one:
2
I knew I could count on HN.
Even better than the first one, which was kind of odd.
This one was quite a prime specimen, however.
Be fair, at least it was rational.
Your dad joke is wholesome
Dunno about wholesome per se, but it's definitely not complex.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
My 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."
I don't get it?
If 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.
As 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.
Along 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.
As 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."
My current torture device: Someone glued my deck of cards together and I just can’t deal with it!
I stayed up all night wondering where the sun went, then it dawned on me!
I was addicted to soap. But now I'm clean.
I like this explanation of the dad joke: 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."
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.
[...]
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-...
The 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.
As a father of a one year old I think a large component of all this is sleep deprivation.
Lots 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.
These 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.
Yeah, 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.
Yeah, 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.
I've heard "Uncle Jokes" as a term for dad jokes with an uncomfortable subject (NSFW or otherwise).
That'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=2ahUKEwiMl...
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.
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).
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.
I too grew up outside the USA, I'd say in a culture very different from any western ones and not just America. We didn't have anything like dad-jokes as far as I can remember.
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.
It'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.
I 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.
I'd never heard the term until a few years ago. They were just bad puns before that.
A bad pun is a good pun.
I entered many of my best dad jokes into a magazine contest. I was sure at least a couple would make the cut to be published but no pun in ten did.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
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.
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.
Calling them "dad jokes" strongly implies that it's the men who aren't funny.
There's a lot more social pressure for men to be funny, which is why the "Dad Joke" concept exists at all.
Comedy 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.
If 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.
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”.
This stuff makes me roll my eyes and I wonder why? 5 years ago I don’t think I would have batted an eye.
Virtue signaling fatigue... Many of us are feeling it.
This thread has given me so much new material. (lol)
I literally told that brown and sticky joke to my 3 year old this morning and he loved it!
There's only two kinds of jokes in this world, kid: dad jokes, and bad jokes
Yeah. Very funny. So, is AWS Eventbridge any good for event sourcing? ;)
My favorite dad jokes were told by women. Just saying...
Where does a cat go after it exhausts its nine lives?
Purr-gatory.
What do pirates put in their salad?
Arrr-ugula!
That can't be a dad joke; it's rated Arrrr.
What's a pirate's favorite letter? You might think it's R, but a true pirate's first love is the C.
Works with programming languages as well!
Also works in Spanish!
Even better in Spanish, because you also get "gato" in there.
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?)
(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.)
Interacting with my kids is a good opportunity to lighten up and be silly.
I certainly can't wear my bosses pants on my head.
> Do we have to make the average middle-aged man into a buffoon
I think we mostly do that to ourselves.
I think I speak for a large majority of people here when I say:
What?
"unfair" ability? such victim mentality. lol, you're so entitled. and Musk was bossing you around before he whas middle-aged.
I 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...
I'm really sorry to hear that a dead pedophile is bullying you. Is he haunting your dreams?