By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Patient readers, I confess that I had another book-length post teed up, but I remain so irritated[1] by my connectivity failure (now solved, here I am), that I decided to be lazy, and what better way to be lazy than to compile a Father’s Day-appropriate listicle? (Yes, that is where the possessive apostropher goes; a single father, at least notionally your own, and not fathers as a collective[2].)
Herewith (not counting the Dad Joke in today’s Links) are my sixteen favorites from this year’s harvest:
1) Shouldn’t the roof of your mouth actually be called the ceiling?
2) I adopted a dog from a blacksmith. As soon as I brought him home, he made a bolt for the door.
3) What state is known for its small drinks? Minnesota.
4) How can you tell if a pig is hot? It’s bacon.
5) What happened at the French cheese factory that exploded? Debris everywhere!
6) I went to buy a pair of camouflage pants, but I couldn’t find any.
7) Age isn’t just a number—it’s a word.
8) Everyone knows Murphy’s Law, where “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” But do you know Cole’s Law? It’s thinly sliced cabbage.
9) What do you call a cross between a joke and a rhetorical question?
10) How do you make a robot angry? Keep pushing his buttons.
11) She said she missed me. Normally that would be good, but she’s reloading.
12) What did one cannibal say to the other while they were eating a clown? “Does this taste funny to you?”
13) I hate hotel bath towels. So thick and fluffy. I can’t even close my suitcase.
14) Two cups of yogurt walk into a country club. “We don’t serve your kind here,” the bartender says.
“Why not?” one yogurt asks. “We’re cultured.”
15) I’d love to share what made me laugh during the pandemic, but they’re all inside jokes.
16) What’s the difference between the bird flu and the swine flu? One requires tweetment and the other an oinkment[3].
(Sources: here, here, here, here, and the Twitter). This being 2024, I asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT what it couldn’t have thought. Here are the results:
I took the screen dump with my eyes carefully averted, and so I can happily say that I’m pleased I didn’t pick any of the jokes that ChatGPT picked. I can also say, even more happily, that ChatGPT is even more stupid than the Dad Jokes: As the helpful annotations show, it doesn’t understand “this year’s” (although ChatGPT jokes #2, #3, and #5 were also in my sources. I had rejected them). CNN’s 2019 “Dad Joke Generator” is more honest; at least it’s openly picking the jokes from a list.
And now to make all the jokes unfunny by trying to explain them….
This is my second aggregation of Dad Jokes; here is the first. That first time, I found them hard to sort them into buckets. This year is easier: There are bad puns (#1 – #5), twisted semantics (#7 – #9), and quasi-psychosocial commentary (#10 – #14). I also curated two jokes on pandemics (#15 – #16), both of which make me feel a bit foily, and wonder who propagates these jokes, anyhow: #15 implies both that “the pandemic” is over, and that the salient feature was (the pissant, at least in the United States) lockdowns. #16 erases all forms of prevention.
All of which makes me think that a comparative and synoptic view of Dad Jokes would be useful to historians of the zeitgeist, although that history was yet to be written[4]. For example, JSTOR, in “The Dubious Art of the Dad Joke:
Bad jokes have come to be strongly associated with middle-aged men with children. Though it’s mostly since 2014 that the mildly pejorative term “Dad Jokes” really caught the attention of the general public enough to enter dictionaries, the idea of an uncool father regaling his kids with corny jokes seems to be widely relatable to lots of people. And when they’re so bad they’re good, these otherwise ridiculous jokes have sometimes become perversely popular and shared by more than just the dads of the world.
Well, no. Because if one checks an actual dictionary:
Absent history (or, as in the first post of what I suppose is becoming a series, philosophy), we can look to pop psychology and sociology. JSTOR, for example, urges that Dad Jokes increase social capital:
Successful jokes, especially when new to the listener, can increase the social status of the teller in the hierarchy of a group, allowing them control over the social interaction. If you’re a good comedian, people are going to give you more opportunities to tell jokes. The performance of joke telling actually usurps the normal turn-taking customs of conversation by reserving the right to speak and forcing listeners to play along with the format of the joke (for example in a knock-knock joke or riddle). For the time of the joke, it’s an exercise in defining a reality that is “fiercely conservative,” according to some researchers, maintaining our conventional views of the world by laughing at what’s different.
(The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy called this process the “Superiority Theory” of humor). I’m not sure Lenny Bruce or George Carlin would agree that jokes are “fiercely conservative,” but here is a case where Dad Jokes reveal an actual policy difference between conservatives and liberals. From Reason, “Federally Funded Dad Jokes“:
“Did you hear the one about the world’s greatest watch thief? He stole all the time.”
But even that guy might be impressed by the sticky fingers of the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse (NRFC), a tiny corner of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that managed to pilfer nearly $75 million in taxpayer money last year to maintain, among other things, an official government repository of “Dad Jokes.”
It’s funny—but not in a good way.
The agency’s website is the source of the cringey joke above, along with other forehead-slappers such as “Why don’t you ever see elephants hiding in trees? Because they are really good at it,” and “Have you seen the new type of broom? It’s sweeping the nation.”
In fairness, the National Strategic Dad Joke Reserve (not the real name, sadly) is just one of the NRFC’s responsibilities. The agency’s website offers a list of fun activities for fathers and kids to do together, along with more serious stuff such as public service announcements about the importance of being a good dad and access to mental health resources.
It’s not “taxpayer money,” ffs; that’s an irritable mental gesture that libertarians and conservatives share. However, I feel sure that for conservatives, if not for libertarians, State support for [genuflects] Fatherhood, and fathers who wish to accumulate social capital, would be a Good Thing, not to be ridiculed (and might in fact be). From the Conversation, “An homage to the Dad Joke, one of the great traditions of fatherhood“:
There’s a reason they’re called Dad Jokes and not father jokes.
“Father” retains the seriousness and stature of a patriarch and all of the power imbalances that accompany it: physical dominance, discipline and dependence. In contrast, “dad” implies affection and care. He’s still a male authority figure, but without the toxicity that patriarchy can often imply.
We see the Dad Joke, then, as an occasion for the dad to assert his fatherly privilege over his family and anyone else within earshot.
It’s a win-win situation for the dad. If the joke gets a laugh, well, good.
But if the joke doesn’t get a laugh … that’s good, too: Dad has intentionally invited this possibility, which is technically known as “unlaughter” [word of the day] and refers to jokes that create embarrassing and socially awkward situations. In this case, the way he flusters his children is his reward.
He’s commanding the room, as a patriarch would, but doing so in the gentlest, most playful way possible.
Then, of course, “it’s all about the children.” From Inc. (of all places, but perhaps not), “A Father’s Day Reminder From Psychology: Dad Jokes Help Kids Boost Their Emotional Intelligence and Be More Successful“:
As you have no doubt observed, a great many top-quality Dad Jokes are puns. And puns, no matter how cheesy, are actually linguistically complex [#1 – #5, and even moreso #7 – #9]. To appreciate them, you need to understand and identify the multiple meanings of a given word and grasp why they might be in conflict. When you’re 13 that may be beyond obvious, but when you’re 3, it’s a new skill that Dad Jokes can help you build.
This is Stanford’s Incongruity Theory, with the incongruous as a means to an end.
But that doesn’t mean Dad Jokes stop being useful when kids age out of “Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine.” Teens may be more mortified by these sorts of jokes than fascinated by them, but as [psychologists Shane Rogers and Marc Hye-Knudsen] note, publicly (but gently) embarrassing your kid is actually the point.
Fathers “revel in the embarrassment their Dad Jokes can produce around their image-conscious and sensitive adolescent children,” they write (surprising no one). Partly, of course, because it’s fun, but also because learning to handle embarrassment is a key component in emotional intelligence.
“Helping children learn how to deal with embarrassment is no laughing matter. Getting better at this is a very important part of learning how to regulate emotions and develop resilience,” point out Roger and Hye-Knudson.
Enduring your dad’s humor in front of your friends teaches you to sit with uncomfortable feelings. But it also demonstrates that jokes can be a useful social tool.
“Jokes can be a useful coping strategy during awkward situations — for instance, after someone says something awkward or to make someone laugh who has become upset,” Rogers and Hye Knudson add.
Which is to say, Dad Jokes boost kids’ emotional intelligence, and the science is quite clear that emotional intelligence is a huge factor in a great many kinds of success in life.
Interesting theory, though I would imagine there are confounders.
Ever told your dad, “Dad, I’m hungry,” only to get the response “Hi Hungry, I’m Dad”? If so, you’ve experienced a classic groan-worthy, eye-roll-inducing, really-should-have-seen-it-coming, so-bad-it’s-good Dad Joke.
Finally, these two passages fascinate me. From the Seattle Times, “Why Dad Jokes crack us up: The surprising psychology explained” (June 10, 2024), the lead:
Ever told your dad, “Dad, I’m hungry,” only to get the response “Hi Hungry, I’m Dad”? If so, you’ve experienced a classic groan-worthy, eye-roll-inducing, really-should-have-seen-it-coming, so-bad-it’s-good dad joke.
And from the Conversation’s piece (June 13, 2024), the lead:
“Dad, I’m hungry.”
“Hi, hungry. I’m Dad.”
If you haven’t been asleep for the past 20 years, you’ll probably recognize this exchange as a Dad Joke.
A future historian of the Zeitgeist might urge that such a concidence cannot be a coincidence. Both passages consider being able to feed children the salient feature of fatherhood (being “a good provider”), and neither passage goes on to discuss the joke; they both shy away from the topic, as if from something not pleasant or not mentionable (which is odd, because so much of humor, even in gentle Dad Jokes, is about transgressing the boundaries of what is pleasant or cannot be mentioned; see #10 – #13 above, which are about anger, violence, cannibalism, and theft, respectively). I would speculate that the authors’ silence reflects anxiety about the future role of fathers; will they, in future — for some unknown but not unimaginable reasons — not be able to provide for children in the future, as (at least in terms of social norms) they have in the past?
And ending on a note like that, perhaps we need some Dad Jokes from you!
NOTES
[1] The final straw, the bale having been rentier extraordinaire Adobe’s InDesign 19.4 consistently crashing on launch without even a message. Step 1 in debugging was to install the current version of MacOS, where I discovered the download — I still had connectivity then — took four hours. So I left my desk and did other stuff, only to discover that the although the download was complete, there was no dialog waiting for me to tell the Mac to go ahead with the installation. So I went ahead with a second download, which again took four hours, and went through steps 2 and many of the InDesign debugging checklist in parallel (basically, check your fonts and throw all the support files away). Then another couple hours whirring away to reinstall the software, reboot several times, etc. Now the uninstalled/reinstalled InDesign works; I just checked it again. But six hours to fix a problem that I didn’t create and should not have to fix.
My conclusion: My workflow depends on a very complex system (both InDesign and MacOS being decades worth of code). And yet, if everything we read about Covid sequelae is true, the general population under our regime of repeated infection will be more sick, more angry, and less performant with respect to executive function (“the stupidest timeline”). Will we be able to maintain the complex systems on which civilization depends under these conditions? Perhaps I should simplify my workflow. And now to collect some jokes!
[2] Like Mother’s Day, but not Siblings Day or Grandparents’ Day.
[3] Here’s a seventeenth, but even though I’m really here just for the Linotype machine:
[4] The genre seems to be making it’s way out into the world where Bernays Sauce is served (Panera Bread; UCLA).
APPENDIX
Dad Jokes, technically, are close kin to one-liners. For grins, here are some clips from a master of that art, Steven Wright:
Rodney Dangerfield is another king of the one-liner, but I’m not linking to him because the jokes are just too tragic.
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A subversive Dad joke is:
“What’s your favourite period movie?”
“Carrie”
(sorry)
If the joke requires a set-up or a prepped side man, it’s not a dad joke.
Some Dad jokes are attempts at connecting with another human.
Survey dads around you and you may find that there is a loneliness or melancholy that accompanies the pride of fatherhood and joy at development of his children. We may be simple creatures but we are not without awareness of social interactions or the time between calls or other contacts
For a variation on the theme, stop to ask how often a dad has human contact, a hug, a handshake, a pat on the back, or anything beyond that.
How do you tell if a joke is a dad joke? It’s apparent.
“Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine.”
Actually, I first heard this joke in grade four: it was told to me by an 8-year-old girl, a classmate who laughed hysterically at her own joke, and who would be mortified if you called her a dad.
By ascribing this type of joke exclusively to dad’s in general is, I suppose, a sly undermining of patriarchy, or more generally, it questions the entirety of our constructed social hierarchy. As an old man with grandchildren I ambivalently embrace them by being involuntarily amused and laughing at them, at the same time realizing that my demographic is the butt of a joke that speaks biological truth to what one hopes is waning social power.
This is indeed a good example of a Dad joke, since children of a certain age find this hilarious and will look for every opportunity to use it themselves.
A working definition might be that if it’s too complicated to be understood by a 10 year old, it’s not a Dad joke.
I’m sticking with this definition, thanks!
Knock Knock.
Who’s there?
Control freak.Now you have to say “Control freak who?”
I read this while I was all alone. Couldn’t help myself. No one else offered.
I feel like from a style standpoint Steven Wright and Mitch hedberg are close enough that it is appropriate for me to say I think Mitch Hedberg is far better.
> Steven Wright and Mitch Hedberg
For those unfamiliar with Hedberg:
Hedberg is indeed very, very good. However, I think that Wright excels in sheer surrealism.
Priest’s joke: Sow banana peels, reap legs in plaster cast.
Anthropologist’s joke: The selfie stick was the last great invention.
Corona joke: The only good health freak is a coughing one.
A joke made by Kid Luther Martinez: I had a dream, but then the pipe burned out.
Hipster’s joke at his fiftieth birthday: Once I was in the wrong movie, now I am in the wrong commercial spot.
Doomer’s joke: Only thumbscrew-optimism¹ helps against doomsday mood.
¹From German neologism Daumenschrauben-Optimismus. Who doesn’t understand this word’s meaning, wouldn’t understand any Doomer’s joke at all.
My favorite all-time example of the lightbulb subgenre was from a Garrison Keillor “joke show”:
Q: How many dull people does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: One. . . .
As a “possive apostropher,” does that mean that one is subject to bouts of Oxford comas?
Ack! Fixed.
I love “Oxford coma.” That must have an application somewhere….
Alfred Hitchcock
Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana
What’s brown and sticky?
A stick…
What’s brown and rhymes with ‘snoop’?
Dr. Dre.
I liked Scott Adams take on puns (a long time ago, when he used to talk about more than just nonstop politics), in that it’s more of an “art appreciation” rather than humour. ie, if you want someone to laugh at a pun rather than be impressed by it, you need to add more dimensions to the joke such as meanness or innuendo (he had a philosophy of humour which is the two of six rule, worthwhile reading if you have an interest in humour or joke construction).
The analyses here seem to miss what I thought was the true way that dad jokes naturally form… first, young kids find puns hilarious, and if it can get your kid to laugh, who wouldn’t do puns all the time? Then as kids get older, they grow out of a lot of things (not just puns, but overt displays of love towards their parents, with “how was your day at school” being met with a grunt before your kid finishes dinner and goes to their room). Because dads love routine and are slow learners, it takes a while to realise that their kids aren’t laughing at puns anymore. Then after that you keep doing it anyway, first because it’s routine but second because the groan or disgust from your kid is at least SOME sort of response compared to them sullenly staring at their phone while you drive them to a friends place….
Lambert, thanks for all this. I have no jokes to offer; I know it’s lame, but I was not appropriately socialized to experience unwelcome awkwardness by my Dad.
:)
My brother was the one with all the dumb Dad jokes, mostly pretty bad. He did once say to me “Tom, as a farmer you’re outstanding in your field”.
You can see why I’ve avoided these sort of things.
In spite of myself, I really enjoyed the ones above from Old Builder, ddt, J.A. La Pietra (that took me rather a long time to get …. does that make me dull?)
Hats off to Dads everywhere. Keep it going, in spite of how rotten and useless and troublesome your kids are. They’ll get over it.
I couldn’t help but think of my favorite, rockin’, French farmers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOSR512-1Hg
(4+ min. music video)
My brother in law came in 3rd in the O. Henry Pun-off a few years ago, and he’s formidable competition in the way of the spoken version, and i’m not so shabby… but prefer QWERTY to let there be no misinterpretation of my missive~
Dad jokes are spoken jokes, as that’s the way we all learned to remember jokes and hopefully not blow it when retelling them, it being an art form of sorts. Everybody pretty much reads jokes online now, with pockets of resistance here and there, merry pranksters in our midst.
We used to go to black humor to soften the blow, with the peak coming aboard the Challenger blowing up real good. Within days after the jokes were pitch black, such as
‘What does NASA stand for?…
Need another seven astronauts’
‘What was the last thing Christa McAuliffe said to her husband?
You feed the dogs, i’ll feed the fish.’
Why did so many of the road builder class pass the course? They were graded on a curve.
The P is silent, as in swimming. Took me 45 years and the temerity to ask my Pop’s to ‘splain it to me.
He had a million of ’em. And yesterdays: Yes! Oui Si Ya does not work as well when told, as opposed to appearing in script.
I was walking with a friend past the local the local prison when I saw a dwarf abseiling down the outside wall trying to escape.
My friend laughed, personally I thought this was a little condescending.
“Daddy, I’m cold”
“Go sit in the corner, it’s 90 degrees”