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A duck walks into a pharmacy and says, ‘Give me some lip balm – and put it on my bill’.

Whether you laughed or not – and I have my doubts – this is, at least technically, a joke. Specifically, it’s what has come to be known as a Dad Joke. In 2019, the term dad joke made it into Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary as ‘a wholesome joke of the type said to be told by fathers with a punchline that is often an obvious or predictable pun or play on words and usually judged to be endearingly corny or unfunny’. This definition raises questions.

How, for one thing, are we to make sense of the apparent popularity of dad jokes given that they are explicitly said to be ‘unfunny’? Even those definitions of the genre that do not specifically use the word ‘unfunny’ include similar slights, calling them ‘lame’ (Dictionary.com), ‘hackneyed’ (OED), or ‘embarrassingly bad’ (Urban Dictionary). Yet many people clearly find dad jokes funny in some sense. On the popular social network Reddit, the community r/DadJokes, which is specifically dedicated to sharing dad jokes, has a staggering 8.8 million members. Similarly, Google Books lists no fewer than 300 books solely dedicated to compiling examples of the genre, and the website Buzzfeed alone has an equal number of articles that are just lists of dad jokes.

What, moreover, are we to make of the association of dad jokes with dads? Are fathers indeed more prone to telling dad jokes, and if so, why? It might seem tempting to simply dismiss dad jokes as bad jokes, at the same time accusing dads of just having a bad sense of humour, but that would be a mistake. When considered properly, dad jokes are an intricately multi-layered and fascinating phenomenon that reveals a lot not just about how humour and joke-telling work but also about fathers’ psychology and their relationships with their children. Dad jokes work on at least three levels: as puns, as anti-humour, and as a kind of weaponised anti-humour when dads use them to teasingly annoy and/or embarrass their children. It is in this last context that the link between dads and dad jokes is to be found…

Table 1: There are countless books and articles solely dedicated to compiling examples of dad jokes. This table displays the very first example of a dad joke included in ten different such books or articles. As apparent from this selection, dad jokes are distinguished by being inoffensive puns that only violate the pragmatic norm against ambiguity and nothing else.

Taken from Hye-Knudsen, 2021.

Funny, unfunny, or somehow both?

Taking dad jokes seriously requires a theory of what makes something funny (or, alternatively, unfunny). At least since the Greeks, scholars have debated this issue, but the most promising line of contemporary research in this area, in my estimation, points towards humour being an evolved response to benign norm violations (McGraw & Warren, 2010; Warren & McGraw, 2016). Dad jokes, in turn, can be defined as puns that only violate a linguistic norm and nothing else (Hye-Knudsen, 2021). Puns typically violate the conversational norm against ambiguity (Aarons, 2017). In normal conversation, we can safely assume that the person we are talking to will only ever say one thing at a time, with their words thus having a clear, singular meaning (Grice, 1975). With a pun, we violate this norm by deliberately saying at least two different things at the same time.

While virtually all dad jokes are puns, however, it’s not all puns that are dad jokes. The pun is often used as a means of violating another norm of some kind, typically a social norm as with a sexual pun. Consider an example from Mel Brooks’ 1981 film History of the World: Part I. Brooks plays an ancient Roman who remarks that ‘we’ve got a god for everything. The only thing we don’t have a god for is premature ejaculation… but I hear that it’s coming quickly.’ This is a pun, but it’s not a dad joke since, in addition to violating the linguistic norm against ambiguity, it also violates a social norm by referring to a sensitive topic in an inappropriately crude fashion. Dad jokes are, by contrast, pure, terminally inoffensive puns. This is what makes them wholesome and appropriate for dads to tell around their kids (see Table 1).

It’s also what makes dad jokes so susceptible to accusations of being stupid, lame, and unfunny. Few people are committed enough to the linguistic norms that govern our everyday conversations for their breach to strike them as much of a violation in and of itself. As such, most people consider dad jokes (i.e., pure puns) a stale form of humour (Beck, 2015). Lacking force as humorous stimuli, puns are, at best, capable of producing a polite chuckle instead of genuine laughter – at worst, condemning groans and eye-rolls.

Yet, telling a joke that is so lame or unfunny that it doesn’t deserve to be told out loud is itself a violation of the norms of joke-telling, and this can in turn make the dad joke funny. Normally when someone shifts to the humorous mode of discourse, which is typically signalled through a shift in tone or the use of discursive markers (e.g. ‘have you heard the one about…’), this is because they have something genuinely funny to say. Dad jokes flagrantly violate this norm by following up this shift with a thoroughly tame pun. A dad joke can thus be so stupid, so lame, so unfunny that this paradoxically makes it funny. In this sense, dad jokes can be considered a type of ‘anti-humour’ – humour derived from violating the norms of humour production itself (Luu, 2019).

Are dad jokes, then, funny or unfunny? The answer to that question can only be: Yes.

What do dad jokes have to do with dads?

Dads appear to have a characteristic way of playing and joking with their children. Fathers are typically more vigorous and challenging in their play than mothers, pushing their children to the limits of what they can handle (Paquette et al., 2003). In their humour directed towards their children, fathers are similarly more aggressive and teasing (Bokony & Patrick, 2009). Children who are approaching or have begun adolescence appear particularly prone to embarrassment, especially in relation to their parents (Pickhardt, 2013), and dads can exploit this by telling them jokes that are so unfunny that they are embarrassing.