The Dad Joke

We all know a “dad joke” when we hear one, but what exactly qualifies as a dad joke and what does it reveal about parenthood, childhood learning and comedy itself? Robert and Joe explore in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of
My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
And today we're gonna be talking dad jokes? Now, Robert,

(00:20):
how did we end up here? So? I was just
thinking about it over the weekend. Basically, I was I,
you know, dad jokes are I think a familiar concept
for most of us. Um. I don't remember being a
named thing when I was growing up, but at some
point in my pre parenthood life it became a thing.
And even non dad's would get called out for dad

(00:40):
jokes at times. And uh now as a as a parent,
it's it's like a frequent call out, you know, not
only in this house, but but I hear it with
with my friends who are who are parents, uh and
also among again friends who are not parents. It's often
a critique of someone else's joke, often from a child,
more from a spouse, but sometimes it's a self commentary

(01:03):
on one's own joke. And I guess I hadn't thought
too much about it. I didn't like, I wasn't too
self reflective on the concept until until very recently My
my son is is eight going on nine, and he's
definitely at the point where he is capable of sarcastic
laughter for particularly punny jokes, particularly you know, any kind

(01:26):
of like uh, perhaps too lame of an attempted humor.
He is liable to respond with sarcasm. And while he
won't say, oh, that's a dad joke, like, clearly we
are in dad joke territory. And so I just started pondering, like,
what does this mean? What is the dad joke? Is
the dad joke a thing? Uh? And if it is, like,

(01:46):
how might we um quantify it? And what does it
reveal about things like childhood development or humor itself? So
in your experience, what is the age where where the
child stops rewarding you for criminally weak puns and and
starts punishing you for them. Um, I guess we're kind
of in that territory right now. Like it's not I

(02:09):
still get get lots of laughs, I'm still pretty good,
I know my audience pretty well, but I'm I'm rolling
out more and more jokes that that he is liable
to either half laugh at or enjoy the awfulness of
the pun. Uh. And part of that I guess is
him picking up on my delivery as well, Like, if

(02:30):
I know that it's a particularly lame joke, I'm probably
going to lean into that delivery, you know. Yeah, well,
I mean it was definitely a thing you'd see with
like Dad's on TV the when you were a kid
that like that. Yes, they embarrass their teenager adolescent kids
by telling grown worthy jokes and then get punished with
the dad. Yeah. You know. This actually came up in

(02:53):
one of the sources I ended up looking at for this,
because because after I was thinking about it, I was like,
surely I'm not the only one kind of lighting this,
and I'm certainly not. But I looked at this one article, uh,
this one post title please stop calling My humor dad
Jokes by Andrew Bougon. Uh. This was from twenty nineteen
published in The Washington I in and um, they basically

(03:15):
made two two points. And I have to stress that
this wasn't like a super serious article like he was.
The authors very much engaging and you know, the humorous
nature and the low stakes aspect of the topic. But
they did bring up the idea of ages um and
dad jokes, but also the idea that they tend to
depend uh, some interpretations of them tend to depend on

(03:37):
outdated gender roles in the household, in which the mom
handles all the whole hard work around the house and
dad just kind of wanders into the room from time
to time to score an easy laugh with the kids.
And I feel like that's the kind of thing reflected
in this sitcom model that you're you're discussing here, With
a lot of American sitcoms like it, it fell upon

(03:58):
the mom character to be the respond constable one in
the family, and the dad got to be the goofball,
you know, the Homer Simpson right, right. Um. So, I
mean not to say there wasn't truth to the trope,
but it's probably a situation too where having this trope
so readily occur in our sitcom culture, it kind of,
you know, echoes back on us. You know, it reverberates

(04:18):
back on the culture itself, and we lean into it
even more, you know. Okay, So I assume at this
point most people are familiar with what a dad joke is,
But then again, I don't know. I often feel disconnected
from terms that people use in this Internet age, especially
since I'm like trying not to look at the social
media's and all that. So like for people who are
not so familiar, what makes a dad joke a dad

(04:41):
joke in the parlance of our times, all right, in
the parlance of our times, Dude, they are they're they're
jokes that are a bit on the lane side in
some estimates. They're often punny, and that they use puns,
and they're generally family friendly. Uh. And the punchline, I
was trying to figure out how the best phrase. I'
like the punchline hits like a crashing clown car. And

(05:03):
your intended audience, like the ideal audience that is actually
going to laugh at this joke is five to seven
year olds. You know they're abouts, um, but that is
in this is key regardless of the current age ages
of those presents. So you might be in the you
might be in the room with say a forty something
and a teenager, but you're still firing out jokes like

(05:26):
you have a whole room full of five to seven
year olds. Now, you mentioned that these jokes are often
puns and that they're often family friendly. Of course, dad
jokes do tend towards very much like uh, simple word play,
and what might be called clean comedy. But another tendency
I've noticed in dad jokes is, I don't even know
what you'd call this, the tendency to make a joke

(05:49):
that is, uh, that is edgy to a really tame extent.
And so this might involve, say, references to people's butts
or extremely minor crude language. So one example cited in
a New York Times article that we're about to talk about, uh,
the author mentions the joke, what has two butts and
kills people an assassin? Uh? Okay, Yeah, that that is

(06:13):
a little edgy for the for the young crowd. But yeah,
I mean not to me. That's very much in the
in what is understood to be the dad joke zone,
because it is a joke that simultaneously violates some kind
of taboo with the use of the word ass but
it is an extremely minor taboo. Yeah, I mean, for instance,
Bart Simpson would love that joke. Uh. So it's it

(06:36):
is it is aimed appropriately, and yeah, there there is
this tendency oftentimes for the jokes to take on this
this child's uh scatological zone. You know that. So it's
gonna involve butts and maybe it's gonna involve poop. There'll
be more of a tendency for poop jokes because this
is something that the young folks enjoy. We can we

(06:57):
can again think of it as kind of the rude
Bart Simpson territory of of of joke craft. Yeah, and
and lots of lots of Dad jokes are completely clean,
but they've got a special purchase on this place that
we might call the edgy side of tame. Yeah. Yeah, now, Um,
One of one other thing I want to touch on
here is that, Um, obviously the terminology we're using here

(07:17):
is is largely gendered, but I think I tend to
reject the idea that it's distinctly gendered phenomenon we were
talking about, Um, you know, it doesn't seem to be
especially tied to masculine ideas. And I'm willing to bet
anything that their appearance of all identities out there that
make what can be classified as dad jokes, oh of course. Yeah,

(07:38):
obviously this is something that transcends dad Dum. I do
think there must be some kind of observation of at
least a slight trend towards these kinds of jokes among
Dad's in particular, but yeah, all kinds of people tell
dad jokes. In fact, the first dad joke that came
to my mind, um, when when I was thinking about this,
when you said you wanted to do this topic was, uh,

(08:00):
it's it's not a legend in my in law's family.
But it wasn't a joke told by a dad, but
a joke told to a dad. And it was in
fact told to a dad by a daughter. It was
something Rachel said to her dad when they were posing
for a family photo and they were trying to get
everybody to smile, and she told the joke. You've probably
heard this one before, but I'll see where did George

(08:20):
Washington keep his armies? I don't know where George Washington
keep his armies in his sleevies like his And the
legend goes that that My father in law like just
laughed so hard at this that his head nearly exploded. Yeah.
I mean there's something about a pun like that, um,

(08:42):
which is hard. It's hard to classify what was that
a really good pun or a really bad one? Uh,
you know, because you kind of you can kind of
trip over it trying to figure out what the connection is,
Like you're trying to like you're visualizing it. Uh, you're
you're thinking about history, and it has nothing to do
with any of those. It's just you know that these
association between various words, It is just making a silly

(09:03):
sound at the end of a word. Yes, that's the connection.
So you kind of feel tricked by it. Uh, But
you have to admire the ingenuity of the trap as well, Like,
you know, it's I can laugh all day at this
bear trap of my legs stuck in it, So I
guess it's pretty good. So I would not be surprised
if research were defined. I do not think such research exists.
I would not be surprised to find that dads are

(09:25):
especially prone to telling dad jokes. But it is undeniable
that dad jokes transcend the dad category. Everybody tells dad jokes, Yeah,
I would agree. Yeah, parents, nonparents, people of all ages,
people of all genders. Um. But this seems to be
a way that we are as a culture classifying them today.

(09:46):
So I again, I was thinking about this over the weekend,
trying to figure out like what what it meant, And
my main observation has to do with identity, importance and
enthusiasm of the audience. So becoming a parent, in my
opinion is is pretty much the best worst thing you
can do. It's it's not for everyone and for many
great reasons, but I can say from experience that it

(10:08):
will at the very least totally change the shape of
whatever your life was prior to the arrival of tiny
humans or a tiny human in your life. Nothing will
be the same again, including your humor. And a lot
of this just have to have has to do with,
like very basic realities about there being a growing human
in your house. So the larval human develops, it grows,

(10:29):
it learns, it develops language and thinking skills, and so
of course it picks up on humor. It begins experimenting
with its own humor. It's uh, this is a process
that is at times delightful, at times arduous. Uh. But
there's a lot of laughter, and you help to cultivate it.
And by the way, speaking of when, the sort of
loose time frame from this, though it varies a bit,

(10:52):
is babies typically start laughing between two and four months. Now.
I was thinking about this because there are obviously several
different ways that having a child in the household will
change the household's humor profile because on one hand, babies
and young children are often humorous, like they can be
the thing that is funny. Then at a certain point,

(11:15):
you might say it like two to four months, they
start becoming the audience for humor. They think things are funny.
But then also they change essentially what people are thinking
about in the household, and most humor is based on
whatever is on your mind at the time, so they
will also become even if it's not like referring to
something they just did or reacting to something they just did,

(11:37):
baby and child humor will sort of occupy the mind
to become the subject of a lot of humor. Yeah, yeah,
there's there's there's a lot that ends up going on there,
you know. And you know it's like they say, you know,
little little pictures have big ears. They pick up on
so much and they end up, uh, you know, mimicking
and trying to understand the humor that you're using. For instance,

(11:57):
when you're you're talking to a non child. Um. So
it's it's really in half the time you're not even
really aware of what's going on, but you're kind of
all in this uh, this this complex learning process together. Um.
But yeah, it does. I feel like it does definitely
change the way you you calibrate your jokes because for me,

(12:20):
example an example, um, and I'd like to think that
I'm a reasonably funny person, and uh, I enjoy it
when I can genuinely make a person laugh, though, like
all of us, will also settle for some polite laughter
from someone else. I feel like I probably had a
pretty good success rate with my humor prior to my
son coming into my life, but with with him once

(12:42):
he reached the point where he was because obviously a three,
you know, super young child is not really going to
be able to understand jokes. You could go up to
a baby in a stroller on the street, you could
tell it a joke and maybe you'll get a laugh
out of him if you're making a goofy enough face.
But they're not really going to pick up on the
nuances of your punchline. Right If you want to make
that that like two to four month old baby laugh,

(13:03):
you're you're more in the prop comedy realm at that point. Yeah, yeah,
you're in the peak abooth stage. So I guess that's
another thing to get to keep in mind. It's like
the barrier to humor starts, uh, you know, in a
weird place, in a very low place. Then you work
up from there. But but I would say that from
the point on at which I could actually make my

(13:23):
my son laugh, I suddenly had just an insanely good
success rate with this audience of one. Um, generating laughter
with almost every joke was just guaranteyed. And the big
kicker was it was authentic laughter every time because he's
for the longest he simply wasn't capable of faking laughter

(13:44):
like it was. You knew that if he was laughing
at a joke, he genuinely found it funny or or
certainly that is that was the impression. Right. Very young
children are not They haven't learned politests yet, right. Um.
But one of the reasons I was reflecting on this
is because I've now reach the point where the boy
is perfectly capable of doing a sarcastic ha ha at

(14:05):
my lamber jokes. Um. But I would say that period
from five to seven years of age, even on up
into year eight here this was probably the most fruitful
comedic period of my life. And and here's the kicker,
I'll never have this rate of success again. I'll never
make another human being laugh this much and laugh this

(14:26):
consistently at my humor. Well, in a way, like having
spent that long trying to get laughs out of a
young child, you've sort of to some degree. I mean,
I'm not saying you can never change Robert, but a
person at this point has cemented a large part of
their adult brain in that mindset, right, right, And yeah,
and neurologically there are reasons you can't go back. But

(14:47):
also it's just like, if I've been going for that
low hanging fruit dad joke for so long and I've
had such a great success rate with it, why would
I ever give it up? You know, It's like if
you're a bear and you found an incredible food cat
in a prius once and now you're just gonna forever
target prius is. Even though most prius is that you
break into are not going to be filled with groceries,

(15:08):
you you still broke into a prius once that had
plenty of groceries, and you're never going to forget that.
So even when the sarcastic ha has come with more um,
you're gonna come more often. I'm probably still going to
make the same jokes. And this seems to be a
big part of what's going on with dad jokes. Like
you go through that that period of success, and then

(15:31):
you change, like you just got such positive rewards from
this style of humor, you don't evolve beyond it. Yeah.
The the young child is a kind of a skinner
box and you're the rat inside it, and it's repeatedly
rewarding you for years on end for for doing the
low hanging fruit joke, and then when that doesn't work
quite so well anymore, Like at that point, can you

(15:52):
really stop? I mean you are conditioned? Ye? So um.
Thinking about the sarcasm aspect of this, I I looked,
I looked into this a little bit, and uh. In
the literature that the idea seems to be that children
begin to develop the ability to comprehend ironic utterances around
five to six years of age. So it's a relatively

(16:13):
late developing skill. Though this this varies a fair amount
as far as individual kids go. And I was reading
this paper from this from n by Capellia at All
titled how Children understand Sarcasm, and this is pretty interesting.
They point out that for an adult to catch sarcasm,
they depend on two different cues. There's context, and then

(16:35):
there's the speakers uh intonation. So you know, I think
we can all imagine like the context situation where I
could say something that is meant to be picked up
as ironic, but I could do so in a very flat,
believable tone, you know. Um. And if you you were
able to compare what I'm saying with the situation and

(16:56):
and or you know me, you can you know what
I'm I'm getting at. Uh um. But the study found
that the children initially depend more heavily on intonation uh
than on context and recognizing sarcasm. So that sarcastic voice
that you use, uh, that's key for these younger children
to being able to pick up on it. And I

(17:18):
feel like I found this in my own life. If
I'm going too dry with my humor, uh, it'll often
like steamroll right past the boy. But if I'm making
the sarcastic voice, he's he he'll get it. And if
he's being sarcastic, oh boy, he will totally lean into
a sarcastic voice. And I feel like I've encountered that
with other kids as well, like they will really really

(17:38):
lay it on thick. Well, I think this ties into
the way that irony and sarcasms so often fail in
writing in written media. You know that, well, I don't know.
I guess it depends on what you call fail. But
like they sometimes people fail to detect irony and sarcasm
in written media. Uh. And this is one of the
reasons that I was actually just reading about this a

(17:59):
while ago, thinking that it might be worth doing an
episode on the idea of ironic punctuation. You know, in
in some writing conventions, there's a way of marking a
sentence to say, like, I don't really mean what I'm
saying in this sentence, I'm saying it for humorous effect,
with like a special you know, a special like upside
down exclamation point or something like that at the beginning

(18:20):
of the sentence. And it's weird because I was thinking
about that, and I was thinking, well, on one hand,
that would help clear up a lot of confusion, because
it just seems inevitable, especially if you're writing for an
audience of multiple people, that you will at some point
make a joke saying something that's the opposite of what
you really think in writing, and people while they might

(18:41):
get it if you said it out loud, will will
not understand you in writing, and they'll be like, how
could you say that? I don't understand you know why?
And so irony punctuation would help clear that up. But
I think it would also make those statements less funny,
Like if you mark them as a joke at the
beginning of the sentence, then is that is it actually
earth making the joke? Like will most of the audience

(19:02):
would normally laugh at it actually find it funny? I'm
not sure. Yeah, it's kind of like announcing I shall
now make a pun before proceeding. Um. But then again,
I mean some languages use this, so it you know,
if it is used, it must work to some extent.
I can't judge it too much. Well, writers, remember what
you're supposed to do. If you have a character in

(19:23):
the third person and they're being sarcastic, you're supposed to say, um,
he said sarcastically, and then the reader will know that
this character is being sarcastic or she said ironically. That's
just good writing and being sarcastic. Um, let's say um.
Well brings me back to this paper you mentioned from.

(19:45):
Was that the year I think it was. If this
is correct, that there are two major cues that people
used to detect irony or sarcasm in a statement. One
is context and the other is intonation. If you're in
a written context, you can't use intonation unless you have
some kind of special punctuation or something like that to
give a you know, a visual version of intonation. So

(20:05):
you're down to only context. Basically you're losing half of
your tool kit for detection. Yeah. And then of course
in the written form, context can vanish as well. Uh so, Uh,
I can see where one might lean on having some
sort of strange punctuation choice that would like forever branded
as ironic, course sarcastic. Yeah, it might be a good idea. Yeah, whoever,

(20:28):
whoever is in charge of English, you know, get on that. Yes,
present this to the Board of of English. So, like
I said, I was thinking about this, and then I
I looked around to see who else had written about it,
and I found an excellent article from just back in

(20:48):
twenty nineteen in the New York Times titled A Dad
Defends Dad Jokes by author and critic Jason Zinoman. And
this seems like a decent person to lean on because
I looked, I looked them up there about my age. Uh.
They've written a book on horror films called shock Value.
So I figured, you know, this might be my people,
and uh and yeah, Ultimately I found that a lot

(21:10):
of what he broke down was kind of like what
I was I was thinking about, you know, with some
additional layers as well. So I want to just roll
through some of of his key observations from this article.
So he observed that quote procreating turns men into miserable comics. Uh.
I think he's you know, he's he's joking a bit there. Um,
though I think we also have to stress that a

(21:31):
lot of parents were probably not particularly funny to begin with. Uh.
So it's it's not necessarily a situation where something great
is lost. Um. He points to a dad joke. Only
because this is this is interesting because I didn't really
have a good idea of what the time frame was.
I figured I didn't hear about it when I was
growing up, but I didn't know exactly how old it was, uh,

(21:51):
he said. He points out that this term only really
comes into usage over the past decade and then becomes
ubiquitous online in very re some years. He writes, quote,
I'm a comedy critic, So being a dad can seem
like an occupational hazard. It may be professional suicide to admit,
but since having children, I often find myself making lame
puns as well as poop jokes. So this is where

(22:14):
he brings up the poop jokes, And um, I was
thinking about myself. I probably make more poop jokes now
than previously because again this is the material that really
zings with kids. Now, what show me the anatomy of
a poop joke is? Is it just uh invoking the
concept of poop? But does it need to be poop
are referred to like out of its regular context? What

(22:37):
makes a good crackling poop joke? Well, most poop jokes
are not good. I find that it has to be
this perfect crossover like a poop joke, that you are
not too ashamed of yourself and that the child will
laugh out. The child will laugh at anything up to
a certain point just because it has the word poop
in it, like poop is inherently funny. Um, probably in general,

(22:59):
but especially to the children. So for from my point,
it's like it can it isn't. It isn't an elequent
enough poop joke that you feel okay telling it and
being the teller of this joke. You know, I was
asking because I was just thinking about a rather poopy
concept to perhaps cover on the show in the near future.
And it was it was the discovery of an ancient

(23:19):
manuscript of a commentary on Homer that had clearly been
used as toilet paper in the ancient world. And it
was found that an ancient garbage dump in Egypt, but
it had poop on it, And I don't know, yeah,
I mean maybe, So we did the episode on the
far dnomicon, so I don't think anything it's sacred anymore. Um,
but maybe see that's not a joke, that's just like, well,

(23:41):
here's an ancient document that was pooped on. So I
don't know if that would fly with kids, or maybe
it would. Would you say, here's a here's an ancient
document and somebody wiped their butt with it. Would that
be funny enough? I mean at a certain age probably yeah.
But then again, are the kids going to pick up
on the weight of if you're talking about like the
works of Homer and stuff? So uh yeah, I'm not sure. Uh,

(24:02):
that's a whole probably a whole domain of humor theory
just regarding poop jokes. Now, I did think that the
author here has in him and really nailed it with
this line. He says, quote, like so many lazy comics,
we parents pander. If jokes work, then they stay set.
Gradually we become hooked on cheap laughs some of us,
some of us even delude ourselves into thinking we are

(24:24):
actually funny. And he points out that once this setting
is obtained, it does not evolve, but the children, of course,
do evolve. And uh, yeah, this totally rings true with
what I'm beginning to experience now, like uh, and it
goes beyond joke telling because I think of all the
various references that my wife and I make in you know,

(24:44):
regarding things that my son once said or once observed
or once did. Um, And they're almost all things that
he does not say anymore, or does not do anymore,
in many cases, does not remember, so he can't even
pick up on the reference, you know, except has heard
us talk about it. But they were like they were
so near and dear to our hearts. Um. And sometimes

(25:05):
they sum up an idea really well, at least for us. Uh.
And I imagine I'm gonna probably keep making these references
for the rest of my life. Like, uh, for example,
he used to say things like so is me instead
of so am I? You know which is? It's kids.
There's a lot of stuff with kids like that, Right,
they say something wrong and it's adorable, it's funny. It's
at least as long as you're connected to them. Um or.

(25:29):
Another example was he used to talk about, uh, if
he was describing the temperature, he might say it was
super a little bit hot, or if it was dark
outside of super a little bit dark. Or he would
overuse and misuse the word crazed. And so these are
just a few examples of things that I can't let
go and I'm probably gonna keep referencing them, even though
they have no connection even to who he is right now,

(25:51):
much less who he will become. Oh, I love super
a little bit hot. That's like, uh, when when a
kid at any point saying they're hungry, they're saying I'm
a little bit starving. Yeah, yeah, that's sort of thing
like that's that's the very sort of thing that a
kid would say, and and you end up lashing onto it.
Um So uh, yeah, I feel like Zenoman totally totally

(26:12):
gets it right there, But it sounds like Zenoman is saying,
and to some extent, you're also saying, the issue is that,
like the child gets older in their sense of humor evolves,
but the parent is inherently kind of stuck in this
older mode of what has worked before. And and this
mirrors other things that happened of course in like parent
child relationships. Like you know, I know a lot of

(26:33):
tension as kids get into like adolescent and teenage years,
is like parents exercising a level of sort of management
and protectiveness that would have been more appropriate to a
child at a younger age, or so the teenager thinks.
And you know, a teenager that thinks like that, you know,
you are still treating me as if I'm younger and
I don't and I rebel against that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(26:56):
I think absolutely. Um there's also and there's him and
gets into this a bit too. There's you know that
they're there's certainly uh he discusses the mockery, the mockery thing, um,
the idea that that we that dad's then continue to
use dad jokes as a way to kind of, um, uh,
you know, get a rise out of the child, and

(27:16):
then the child kind of mocks them for using that humor.
But he also gets into this idea that um, that
it's a lot of it's tied up with with nostalgia.
So first of all, there's of course the nostalgia for
when your child was younger and they laughed at everything
you said. Uh, and you're the funniest person on earth.
But also, um, he says that that basically dad jokes

(27:39):
give us permission to joke like children again. Uh, you know,
just to give us permission to make these kind of
you know, lame short, you know, not too not too
deep jokes that are that are you know, usually pretty tame. Um.
And it's I feel like it's part of that larger
trend in the way that parenthood gives one permission to
a point to think and dream like a child again,

(28:02):
because you dream with them, you introduced them to the
stuff that filled your childhood engage, and you yourself get
to engage with all of it again. Um. Like I
mean example for that with with that for me would
be like Star Wars. I introduced my son to Star Wars.
He got super into it, and I would say I
probably got more into it than I had ever been
in my life, like even more than I was when

(28:23):
I was a kid, because I am experiencing it through him.
Now I witnessed this just through you. Like you you
went through a Star Wars renaissance in the past four years. Yeah, yeah,
and um and it's I don't think it would have
taken place without him. I mean maybe it would have.
You know, people still go on these various nostalgia cycles
and um, and I certainly do that with things that

(28:44):
have no connection to my son. Um. But uh, but
but but I I can definitely see how how parenthood
plays into it. So so yeah, nostalgia seems to be
a big point. And then he also points out the puns.
One thing about puns is that puns are in and
of themselves pretty great. You don't have to be a

(29:05):
parent or a dad or what have you to really
enjoy puns. Uh. Shakespeare made use of puns, and I
can think of plenty of of of adults, parents and
non appearance alike who go crazy for a good pun.
I feel like the adult pun market, though, tends to
skew more towards uh rewarding puns that violates some taboo

(29:27):
beyond just the standard understood definition or use of a word,
like a lot of adult puns are also sort of
vulgar or edgy in some way. Yeah, and certainly true
of a lot of Shakespeare puns. Yeah, yeah, in a
way though. I think that's one of the things that
makes things like um, where did Washington keep his h
his his armies? Like? One of the reasons that works

(29:48):
so well and it sticks with me so well, is
because most uh comedy aimed at adults by adults, Uh,
isn't it. You know it's gonna go for those those
cheaper laughs and those edgy or laughs, and your your
defenses are down for these sort of weapons. It's kind
of like in um in Frank Herbert's done, where they
have the self protective shields and you can't fire a

(30:09):
bullet through it, and you can't like quickly stabbed through it.
You have to go slow. It's like that's kind of
how the the tame humor can be. It's like, I
had my defenses were not designed for a blade this slow,
and now you have stabbed me in the heart. The
dad joke is in a way the weirding module. Yeah,
it trains you on the slow knife combat of of
pun humor. Yeah. Um. Now, another thing that the Zenoman

(30:33):
got into that I thought was interesting was touching on
when you get into this area where a dad or
you know, a parent is making this dad joke, this
this kind of lame joke that then it lects size
and groans from everyone in the room. You're also getting
into the area of of cringe comedy here, um, which
which I think is is a good point. Like we
don't necessarily think of, say The Office as being dad

(30:58):
jokes and dad humor, but there was a lot of
that there. I mean, the character of Michael Scott, for example,
engage in a lot of this making like really bad
uh jokes, really lame attempts at humor and u and
it was hilarious. We loved it. Well, yeah, that kind
of cringe comedy, like the comedy that's based in witnessing
something somebody do something incredibly embarrassing and like just fail

(31:22):
in front of an audience. It's a weird kind of
mixture of humor and it's something that feels like it's
simultaneously relatively wholesome and doesn't have to get into you know,
like like raunchy content, but at the same time feels
absolutely as dangerous as like the most raunchy blue comedy,
just because it's so like painful, it's like emotionally visceral

(31:46):
to watch embarrassment based humor. Yeah yeah, um. Now, speaking
of stand up when when Nyman got into this idea
as well, that you know that the dad joke is
generally not only haim, it's also very lean. You know,
it's it's it doesn't take much time to tell, it's
not complicated. This reminded me a lot of the stand

(32:08):
up comedy of the late Mitch Hedberg, but also some
of the I guess a lot of the comedy of
Stephen Wright. Uh not to say that those uh, those
two engaged in and really straightforward dad jokes, but a
lot of it was very short. Um, a lot of
it was ultimately very clean, uh, very silly, you know,
in a in their their own way, I mean, right

(32:30):
is was certainly very dry. Uh. But whereas like like Hedberg,
I feel like he he was an interesting case because
he kind of got away with it because they have
this cool, stoner persona, but he's essentially in many cases
just doing like kind of dad jokes. And I guess,
you know, sometimes it's a little lunear than that. And
Stephen Wright has this very extremely dry delivery and it's

(32:50):
based uh uh you know, and it's it's sort of
a weirdness. Um. But you could look at this dad
jokes as being just kind of like the latest, most
popular or way to categorize a kind of style of
joke telling that maybe isn't, um, you know, the main
fashion right now, but hasn't been more fashionable in the

(33:11):
in the past, and is still utilized well by certain
practitioners of comedy. Yeah, the self contained one liner seems
important here, though I wonder if some I mean, I
don't know, maybe I have the wrong sense about this.
Uh So, a lot of like Mitch Hedberg type jokes,
a lot of them seem to hinge on a kind
of absurdity, which I don't know how well it translates

(33:33):
to kids or not. I think about his joke where
he says, um, rice is a great food if you
ever want to eat a thousand of something. I find
that funny. Is that funny to kids? Maybe? Um, I mean,
I don't know about that particular joke, but maybe like
kids have, kids are great at absurdity, Like kids are
a font of absurdity. Um. I mean, that's one of

(33:54):
the reasons they can be they can be so amusing
to be around. Um. So, so it was very possible.
I mean that one's I mean, I'm not even sure
if I could put my finger on what it is
that's funny about that one. I guess it's just imagining
the possibility of eating a thousand hamburgers or a thousand
of anything else. Yeah, yeah, I agree, it's just it's

(34:16):
it's absurd. Um it turns something every day on its
head and makes you and like makes it weird. Uh.
So that's I feel like I will have to try
this one on my son later and report back. I'm
not gonna let him watch a whole set of Mitch Hedberg,
but maybe I'll bust out a few Mitch Hedburg and
a little Steven Right and see see how he reacts,
see which one he likes. Bet thank you? Okay, Well,

(34:45):
I thought one way to to try to bring some structure,
uh to this idea would be to think about theories
of humor. Now, even this is is still going to
be a little bit loose, because there's clearly not one
agreed upon um theory that explains the role of humor
in biological organisms. We we've talked about this in the past,

(35:05):
but so there are different attempts that psychologists, UH and
cognitive scientists have put forward in trying to explain why
we laugh at things, like what's actually happening in the brain,
what is humor in a biological sense? And UH, I
think the place where most recently we went into depth
on this subject was in our two part series called

(35:28):
Flat a Sex Makina, which was about why it's funny
when machines fail, where we talked about neural net generated text,
which was a lot of fun We talked about like
D and D characters and spells and stuff created by
neural networks, but that we also talked about about like
scenes where like robots fail in movies like ED two

(35:49):
O nine in RoboCop, which is a stairs yeah. Um.
But so in that context we were trying to figure out, okay, well, well,
how does this fit into these mainstream hypothesis is about
what is going on in the body and the brain
and our evolutionary history to generate this concept of humor.
Why are things funny? Why does it feel funny? Why

(36:09):
do we laugh? And so forth. And so there are
a bunch of ideas on this. We're not going to
get into all of them, certainly, not in depth, but
I just wanted to mention a few One that came up,
I think from a biologist or zoologist that we were
reading that time, But it was the idea of laughter
as a form of play signaling. And I thought that
this idea had some purchase. It was pretty interesting. So

(36:31):
the idea here would be that laughing is actually a
kind of communicative mechanism to distinguish playful aggression from genuine aggression.
So if you ever watch dogs fighting, they can be
making all kinds of growling sounds and knocking each other
over and all that, but you can still pretty easily

(36:52):
tell fun fighting from real fighting by the dog's posture.
Like when a dog is having fun, it'll like put
it's butt up in the air, in the front of
its body down and wag its tail. And so they
can be fighting, but you know, we know everybody's having
a good time. Yeah, you can definitely tell from their
body language when they're they're dead serious and when it's

(37:12):
it's play. Yeah, And so the idea would be, well,
maybe in in primates like us laughter play some kind
of similar role. It is a it's a mechanism like
the wagging tail, to signal mutual communication between parties that
something that's going on that might be interpreted in one way,
maybe in a dangerous way, is actually just to be

(37:34):
interpreted in a humorous way, in a fun way, that
everything's okay. And so it discourages misinterpretation of mock aggression.
And I can certainly see something to this, because it
is it is undeniable, like this this natural thing that
happens that when kids like wrestle for fun or they're
just playing around, it results in laughter. You know, this

(37:55):
makes me think about tone and contact with sarcasm again,
because there I've certainly had this experience where I've I've
told I've made a dry joke that that is supposed
to be a joke, but I did it so dryly
that that my son doesn't catch it at first, and
then I have to explain to him, no, no no, no,
I'm not serious, um you know, not that he's upset,

(38:18):
but he's like, really, that's really gonna happen, Like he
completely falls for it. And then I feel a little
bit bad because my main job here is not to
make jokes. It's it's to raise a child that knows
how the world works or has some reasonable knowledge of
how the world works. And so maybe I want I
wonder this is I have nothing to back this up,
but maybe parents end up leaning more on tone. They

(38:41):
pick up on on the fact that they need that
tone to understand the joke, and so you just lean
into it more and more, and you keep leaning into
it until you're just a complete hack. Yeah, that's interesting.
I didn't think about it like that, but yeah, because
tone would be so important in in establishing this kind
of really ship with a kid. Yeah, Like, why does

(39:02):
why does dad basically put clown makeup on every time
he makes a joke? Well, because he feels like he
needs to signal that he is not telling you how
the world worked, He's just trying to make a joke
about the world. I nothing to back that up, but
I'm just just just you know, um brainstorming here. No,
I think there's something really too that we should keep
that in mind. Um. Now, on on the other hand,

(39:25):
as we talked about the last time this came up
in that Machine Comedy episode, Uh, there are obviously ways
in which all of these major theories don't seem to
account for some types of laughter and some types of humor,
which makes me think, you know, it could very well
be that multiple theories of humor could simultaneously be partially

(39:45):
correct and explaining different types of laughter. I mean, we
can't rule out that laughter could have different biological causes
converging on the same external behavior, much in the same
way that like multiple extremely different, you know, biological causes
can result in an elevated heart rate. Maybe multiple totally
different biological causes, uh that you know, have different evolutionary

(40:09):
pathways of development could eventually converge on the same type
of body response, which is the pleasure of humor in
the brain and the external behavior of laughing. That that's possible.
So maybe each of these explanations has some part of
the truth. But the reason you would need to say
that is that, like, some of these explanations don't really
seem like they would cover certain types of humor, like

(40:29):
especially play signaling. I mean, does how would that really
affect something like puns? It seems kind of hard to
figure that out. Ye. Now, another major explanation of what's
going on when when people experience the feeling of humor
is what's known as benign violation theory. One study we

(40:49):
talked about in the past having to do with this
was by Peter A. McGraw and Caleb Warren called Benign
Violations Making immoral Behavior Funny, published in Psychological Science in
two thousands. Him and this study looked at the idea
of humor as some kind of violation of norms that
is recognized by the person who finds it funny as

(41:12):
not actually very harmful. Uh So, the example they used
in their study was they they confronted people with a
news story about a church that had raffled off a
Hummer suv as part of a promotion for its members,
for the church goers. And so the thinking here is
that obviously to some people, that's going to be kind

(41:33):
of a funny idea, right, like doing a sort of
secular like car giveaway at a church would seem to
in some way undermine the sanctity of the church. And
they they figured under their theory, well that maybe church
goers would find this story less funny because they would
see this violation of the sanctity of the church as

(41:54):
more actually harmful than non churchgoers would. And they wouldn't
find it as funny if humor is indeed based on
the idea of a benign violation, and that is what
they claimed to find in this study. They found that
churchgoers and non churchgoers were both about equally disgusted with
the idea of a church giving away a car, but
they found that non churchgoers found the story more humorous

(42:16):
than churchgoers did. So I think it was like nine
tent to sixty. So the idea would be that non
churchgoers saw this as a benign violation, churchgoers saw it
as a real harmful violation. And in that other episode,
we we talked about a bunch of reasons why this
might and might not work to explain certain types of humor, Like,

(42:37):
there are a lot of things that are clearly benign
types of violations that just aren't funny. But then again,
a lot of the things that are funny are some
type of benign violation. You could see easily how you
could make them not funny by either making them not
a violation at all, or by making them such a
violation that they actually hurt someone. Yeah. I in the past,

(43:00):
I've definitely seen the nine violation theory being one that
that feels feels accurate, like I can I can feel
it feels like that's what's going on in various jokes.
But again, I would be hesitant to to assign all
humor to this one theory. Yeah, this seems to me
like one that maybe sort of grasping in the right direction.

(43:23):
But but that might not have the full contours of
exactly what makes something funny or not, because there are
the I mean, there are plenty of cases where things
are clearly truly harmful and people still find them funny.
Like sometimes even against your better judgment, like you might
something might happen that is clearly harmful in one way
or another, and you find it funny even though you

(43:43):
feel like you shouldn't, and you feel bad for finding
it funny. Yeah, but but sometimes they are funnier, like
knowing that everyone is okay, Like I've seen that that
disclaimer placed in front of the sharing of various like
amusing video clips these days, where it will be stressed
everybody was fine, nobody was actually killed or seriously wounded

(44:03):
in what you're about to see. Therefore you have you
have license to actually laugh at it. Now, there's another
one we talked about just briefly in that other episode
that was called the incongruity resolution theory, and essentially that says,
when there is a mismatch between expectation and reality, you
expect things to be one way, but then there's something different.

(44:24):
Laughter occurs when we realized that this incongruity can be resolved.
So that's another way of framing something that is in
some ways kind of similar. But there's one last one
I wanted to talk about that I've been thinking about
more and more since we discussed in since we talked
about it in in that plate s X Market episode.
And this is thinking about laughter from an evolutionary perspective.

(44:47):
So one of the things that is really notable about
laughter is it's not just an external behavior. Laughter is pleasurable.
It feels good. You like specifically seek out stimuli to
make yourself laugh, just in the same way you would
seek out like delicious food. It feels good and you
want it to keep happening. Uh. Usually, pleasure is a

(45:10):
biological reward. The brain delivers itself pleasure in response to
an activity that provides some kind of direct or indirect
benefit to survival or reproduction. And these, of course you
know in the case of direct benefits, you can think
about the obvious stuff you know, food, food tastes good
because you need it to give yourself energy and survive.

(45:31):
Or it can be much more abstract, like socializing with
others can feel really good, and that's pretty clearly explicable,
and that it's the strengthening of social bonds and informing
you know, tighter relationships between yourselves and other people, which
which gives you more of a support structure, makes you
less vulnerable. Or you could think about the sense of

(45:51):
accomplishment you get from completing a task. So if laughter
is an adaptation that provides not just an external behavior
but internal pleasure reward, what is it rewarding? And one
answer that I that I came across to this is
that what if it's the brain rewarding itself for performing

(46:12):
a debugging procedure? Basically uh And this was an idea
explored in a two thousand eleven book from M I. T.
Press called Inside Jokes by Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dinnett, and
Reginald Adams Jr. And I have not read this book,
but I've read some summaries of the argument they make,
and essentially it is that humor is a pleasurable reward.

(46:35):
It's the you know, the reward inside the brain that
we get when we recognize the inappropriateness of a mental representation.
So in this all jokes basically have some form of
set up and punchline. Uh. The setup sort of puts
you in a state of mind to establish an inappropriate
or unrealistic mental representation, and then the punchline kind of

(46:59):
suddenly creates that inappropriate or incongruous mental representation. And then
what happens immediately after is that you suddenly figure out
what's wrong with the representation that's in your brain. So
in the Armies and Sleevies example, uh, you know, it's
like you suddenly have that moment where you realize, oh, oh,
I see yes, armies in this is just referring to arms,

(47:23):
and that is not how grammar works. You don't actually
say ease at the end of every noun. But then
the brain rewards you for going through that process of
debugging the problematic representation in your brain by giving you
this pleasurable feeling of humor that is in some ways
analogous to the pleasure that you would get from eating
delicious food or sleeping or something like that. And so

(47:46):
this really gets my brain going because I wonder about
this debugging interpretation. Obviously, you know, I think this would
have its critics as well, like all of these ideas do.
But I wonder if you could see evidence for this
debugging inter rotation in the special kinds of humor that
are especially effective with little kids but start getting groans

(48:07):
once the kids get older. Is a young brain in
a more frantic debugging phase? Is it? You know? Is
the young brain more apt to make an inappropriate mental
representation and then get a lot of pleasure from figuring
out no, that's not how words work, or something like that,
And uh? Is it? Is it? Also? Is the young

(48:29):
brain more susceptible to bugs of this kind in the
first place? You know, will will you sort of fall
for the setup and punchline in a way that makes
the debugging possible? No, yeah, I can I could see that.
Uh that playing a role here. Yeah, you're you're When
the sitcom dad wanders into the room and tells a joke,
He's not just trying to get some cheap laughs. He
is debugging the children's brains. He is, uh, he is

(48:52):
helping them sort out, uh, some possible errors in their
cognition by basically presenting them with with little um, a
little thought puzzles, little thought experiments that they have to
instantly deal with. I mean this does kind of go
along with another aspect of humor, which is that humor

(49:13):
often kind of gives you a little bit of a
feeling of being smart. Have you ever noticed this, Like
when when you laugh at something and something you find
something very funny. In the back of your mind, there's
almost kind of a little like, yeah, you're pretty smart,
you're a genius. Yeah. Yeah. To to get a joke,
To laugh at a joke is to sync up with

(49:35):
the mind of the comedian that is telling it or
or has written the joke. And uh, yeah, I could
see that. Yeah, I can see that interpretation for sure.
I'm super a little bit smart. Yeah, pretty much. Um yeah, Okay,
I like this this interpretation. Yeah, it makes me wonder
if this is this is part of it as well.

(49:57):
But it also makes me wonder about I guess this
came up a little bit earlier, but you know, can
we understand how dad jokes work by looking at when
they really do not work? You know that period where
I guess the kid gets to adolescents or whatever, at age,
whatever age it is where they start to really groan
at dad's dad jokes or at anybody's dad jokes and

(50:18):
and say, Dad, you know, like, what exactly has changed
that is failing there? And does that tell us about
what worked with the jokes originally? Well, I mean, if
we were to roughly compare it to say, a child
getting ready to leave the house at a younger age,
they need a lot of help and reminding and uh,

(50:39):
you know, a lot of nagging to get to get
it done. Are your pants on? Are you wearing the
right shirt? Is it buttoned up properly? Let me see
your hair? Um? And as they get older there, you know,
ideally they're they're doing more and more of this themselves,
and they might take a front at you, uh, interjecting
yourself and saying I think you need to rebutton that
shirt or I'm not sure that that hair looks completely etcetera.

(51:00):
So maybe something similar is going on with the the
debugging of their brain with puns and bad jokes. Is
that you're saying, uh, let me see that brain of
yours for a second, I'm not sure I got all
the bugs and they're like, Dad, I got you got
all the bugs. There are no bugs left, but maybe
there are. You know, that's why you keep at it.
You know, I'm thinking about another interpretation of uh. What
could be a possible reason that parents keep telling grown

(51:23):
inducing jokes as their kids get older and start being like,
awful mom, dad, don't talk. You know that that's that's
the worst? Is that A lot of times what can
be frustrating. I think about interacting with somebody who's like
a teenager is like sort of low affect in in
many different directions, you know, just kind of like inability
to give much of a response in any direction, and

(51:45):
so getting a very very clear, gross kind of emotional
response in the form of a groan at a really
really painful pun in a way that is a big reaction, right,
you know, at a time when maybe a lot of
it's are just like not reacting enough. I don't know
if that makes any sense, you know it totally does?
You know, Like there's this uh and I don't I

(52:08):
only have limited experience with with like the junior high
and teenager set, but but you know, from from interacting
with with niece and nephew, Uh, yeah, they're at times
there can be that feeling of like all right there
in their own own little world, you know, either uh,
you know, completely absorbed by their their phone and what
have you. Uh So, maybe you're not gonna get a
laughter laughter out of them. But if you can get

(52:30):
that grown, if you can get their eyes to roll,
at least they're listening to you, you know, at least
you've made some connection. And it probably ties back into
you can make an easy analogy to stand up comedy,
right like you, I guess you ideally, if you can't
be the comedian who's just getting you know, an uproar
of laughter, at least if you could get the the opposite,

(52:51):
that would be something. If you could get like the
Andy Kaufman um kind of response right where you're just
enraging the audience and you know, and you're making them
feel something. You're still working with comedy, but you're you're
going after a different emotional response. It comes back to
the idea that that perhaps dad jokes are just a

(53:11):
one way of thinking about a particular type of humor,
that that is, um is desirable in and of itself,
outside of any kind of uh, parental context. And you know,
just as this this, you know, used to be more
popular as a mainstream form of comedy. Um, you know,
it's it's still going to find an audience today again,

(53:31):
in part perhaps because your your guard is down to
that that slow moving comedic knife. I was just trying
to look up the name of the martial art that
you do with the knives in Dune. I don't think
it has a name, but they're the Chris knives in Dune. Yeah,
to past the Holtzman shields. Yeah, this is just the
way you try and stab somebody with the Holtzman shield

(53:51):
But I had forgotten about this detail as well. Apparently
you can't use lace guns or Holtzman shields on Iracus
because the energy field created by them attracts sandworms. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
that that's that's right. I still need a part of
me wants to reread the first book again, and now
I have more time in anticipation of the of the

(54:14):
movie when it comes out this fall. Uh So, I
don't know. I'm trying to decide on that, or maybe
I should read it to the Boy. I can't decide.
When is the Boy enough for Dune? I don't know.
Like there because there's a lot of heady stuff in there,
but there's also a basic adventure story, you know, about
a young person coming up in the world. Um, there
is a lot of brutal violence and treachery, true, but

(54:35):
you know, ultimately you find that in every everything. There's
a lot of a lot of kids literature that has
a lot of betrayal and violence in it. Okay, what
we need is like an age chart that maps response
to dad jokes with with a receptivity to dune and
like where that coincides. All right, but before we close that,
I do want to mention one cool dad joke, if

(54:58):
that is even a thing that sounds like an more
on perhaps, but this was provided by Andrew Bourgeon in
that twenty nineteen article in The Washington I and uh,
this is out it goes. When does a bad joke
become a dad joke when it's a parent A very

(55:19):
nice All Right, we're gonna go ahead and close this
one out, But obviously we'd love to hear from everybody
out there. What what is your experience with the so
called dad joke? Um, you know, what's what's your take
on it? Your experience with it on the receiving end
on the giving end. Um, we loved, we loved for
everyone to chime in on this, so uh, do let

(55:40):
us know in the meantime if you want to check
out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, including
those that we referenced earlier about humor and teasing and
so forth, you can find them wherever you get your podcast,
even the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. We've
got core episodes on science and culture that come out
on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday's we have a listener mail.
On Wednesday's we usually have an artifact unless it's been

(56:03):
preempted by something. And on Friday's that's when we do
Weird House Cinema, where we leave most of the science
on the shelf instead focus on some sort of a
weird picture. Uh. And then we have a volt episode
on the weekend that's a rerun. Huge thanks as always
to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback

(56:24):
on this episode or any other to suggest topic for
the future, just to say hello, you can email us
at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of I heart Radio.
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(56:45):
Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your
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