From the Vault: The Dad Joke

There's a certain certain art to them. So without further ado, let's dive right in Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey are 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, how did we end up here? So? I was just thinking about it over the weekend. Basically, I is, um, 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 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 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 or from a spouse, but sometimes it's a self commentary 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 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, 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 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 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 embarrassed their teenage or adolescent kids by telling grown worthy jokes and then get punished with the dead Yeah. You know, this actually came up in 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 contemplating this,

and I'm certainly not. But I looked at this one article, UM, this one post title please stop calling My humor dad Jokes by Andrew Bourgeon. Uh. This was from twenty nineteen published in The Washington I In and um, they basically 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 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 you're discussing here, With a lot of American sitcoms like it, it fell upon the mom character to be the responsible one in the family, and the dad got to be the goofball, you know, the Homer Simpson right, right, Uh. 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 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. Uh. So, like for people who are not so familiar, what makes a dad joke a dad

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 punch line, I was trying to figure out how to the best phrase. I feel like the punch line hits like a crashing clown car, and 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 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 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? H Okay, yeah, that it added a little edgy for

the for the young crowd. But but 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 violate 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 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 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 is is largely gendered. But I think I tend to reject the idea that it's distinctly injured 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 parents of all identities out there that make what can be classified as dad jokes. Oh, of course, obviously this

is something that transcends dad dumb. I do think there must be some kind of observation of at least a slight trend toward 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 it's it's now 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 Washington keep his armies? I don't know. Wheed George Washington keep his armies in his sleevies? Like, 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, 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. Um, You're you're thinking about history, and it has nothing to do with any of those. It's just you know, these association between various words. It is just making a silly 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, but 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 dad are 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. So again I was thinking about this over the weekend, trying to figure out like what what it meant, and uh, 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 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, 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, 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, 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 households 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, 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, 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, a 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, 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, example, an example, um and I'd like to think that I'm a reasonably funny person and I enjoy it when I can genuinely make a person laugh, though like all of us, I'll 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 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 scroller 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, you're you're more in the prop comedy realm at that point. Yeah, yeah, you're in the peak a booth stage. So 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 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 guaranteed. 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 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. 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 reached the point where the boy is perfectly capable of doing a sarcastic ha ha at my lambur jokes. Um. But I would say that period from five to seven years of age, uh, 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 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 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 cash 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. 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 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 really stop? I mean you are conditioned? Yeah,

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 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 Capelli 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 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 and or you know me, you can

you know what I'm I'm getting at um. But the study found that the children initially depend more heavily on intonation uh than on context and recognizing sarcasm. So that sarcastic uh voice that you use, uh, that's key for these younger children to being able to pick up on it. And I 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 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 lay it on thick. Well, I think this ties into the way that irony and sarcasm 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 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

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 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 worth making the joke? Like will most of the audience who 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 the third person in there being sarc plastic, 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. Was that the year I think it was. If this is correct, that there are two major cues that people use 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 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 brand it as ironic or sarcastic. Yeah, it might be a good idea. Yeah, whoever, whoever is in charge of English, you know, get on that. Yes, present this to the

Board of of English. Than 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 twenty nineteen in the New York Times titled A Dad Defends Dad Jokes by author and critic Jason Zenoman. And this seemed 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 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 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 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,

he said. He points out that this term only really comes into usage over the past decade, and then becomes ubiquitous online in very recent 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 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 zeems 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 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, but especially to the children. So for from my point, it's like it can it isn't. It isn't an eloquent 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 manuscript of a commentary on Homer that had clearly been used as toilet paper in the scient 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 Pardonomicon,

so I don't think anything it's sacred anymore. Um, but maybe see that's not a joke, that's just like, well, 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, that's a whole probably a whole domain of humor theory, just regarding poop jokes. Now, I did think that the author here has 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 some of us even

delude ourselves into thinking we are 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, 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. And you know, except he's heard us talk about it. But they were like they were so near and dear to our hearts um. And sometimes 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 anny is at least as long as you're connected to them. Um. Or 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, 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 ended up lashing onto it. Um so uh yeah, I feel like Zenoman totally totally gets it right there. But it sounds like Zenomon 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 the

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 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, the 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, I think absolutely. Um there's also and there's anything gets into this a bit too. There's you know, 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 uh, you know, get a rise out of the child, and 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 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 because you dream with them, you introduced them to the stuff that filled your childhood engage, and 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 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 have no connection to my son. Um but uh, but but but I can definitely see how how parents it plays into it. So so yeah, nostalgis seems to be a big point. And then he also points out the puns one thing about puns, though, is that puns are in and of themselves pretty great. You don't have to be a 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 violate some taboo 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 so well and it sticks with me so well, is because most comedy aimed at adults by adults, Uh, Isn't you know it's gonna go for those those cheaper laughs and those edgy or laughs, and so your your defenses are down for these sort

of weapons. It's kind of like in um in frank Herbert's doone where they have the self protective shields and you can't fire a 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. It trains you on the

slow knife combat of of pun humor. Yeah. Um. Now, another thing that the Zoman 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 a is a good point, Like we don't necessarily think of, say the Office as being dad jokes and dad humor, but there was a lot of that there. I mean, the character of Michael Scott, for example, engaged in a lot of this making like really bad of 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 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 to watch embarrassment based humor. Yeah, yeah, um. Now, speaking of stand up when when Zannaman got into this idea as well that you know that the dad joke is generally not only tame, 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 up comedy of the late Mitch Hedberg, but also some of the I guess a lot of the comedy of Stephen Wright.

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, is certainly very dry. Uh. But whereas like like Hedberg, I feel like 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 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 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 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 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 the reasons they can be They can be so amusing to be around. Um, so so 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 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 a 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 Hedberg and a little Steven Right and see see how he reacts, see which one he likes. Bet Thank Okay, Well, 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, 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 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

O nine in RoboCop, which is down the stairs. Yeah. Um. But so in that context we were trying to figure out, Okay, well, well, how does this fit into these mainstream hypotheses 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 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, so it was pretty interesting. So 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 tell fun fighting from real fighting by the dog's posture. Like when a dog is having fun, it'll like put its 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 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 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 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 it 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, I'm not serious. Um you know, not that he's upset, 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 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 relationship with a kid. Yeah, Like why does 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 have nothing to back that up, but

I'm just just just, uh, you know, um brainstorming here. No, I think there's something really too that we we should

keep that in mind. Um. Now on on the other hand, 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

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 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 ex nations don't really seem like they would cover certain types of humor, like especially play signaling. I mean, does how would that really affect something like puns? It seems kind of hard

to figure that out. Yeah. 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 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 thousand ten, 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 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 motion for its members for the church goers. And so the thinking here is that obviously to some people, that's going to be kind 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 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 than churchgoers did, so I think it was like nine percent to sixty two percent. 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, 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. Yeah, in the past, 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, But but that might not have the full con Who are is 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 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 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 an a mismatch between expectation and reality, you expect things to be one way, but then there's something different. Laughter occurs when we realize 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 Plato s X Market episode. And this is thinking about laughter from an evolutionary perspective. 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 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. 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 uh 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

accomplishment you get from completing a task. So if laughter is an adaptation that provides not just an external behavior but an 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 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 to year 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. 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 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, and that is not how grammar works. You 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 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 interpretation in the special kinds of humor that are especially effective with little kids but start getting groans 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 brain more susceptible to bugs of this kind in the first place? You know, will will you sort of fall for the set up 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 helping them sort out, uh, some possible errors in their cognition by basically presenting them with with little um, 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 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 the mind of the comedian that it's 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, and it makes me wonder if this is this is part

of it as well. But it also makes me wonder about Um, 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 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, you know, a lot of nagging to get to get it done. Are your pants on the 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 combed, etcetera. So maybe something somewhere is going on with 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 inducing jokes as their kids get older and start being like the 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 so getting a very very clear, gross kind of emotional response in the form of a grown 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 kids 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 you know, I don't. I only have limited experience with with like the junior high end 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 going to get a laughter laughter out of them, but if you can get 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, 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 the 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 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 here as a mainstream form of comedy. Um, you know, it's it's still going to find an audience today again 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 there are the Chris knives in Dune. Yeah, to get past the Holtzman shields. Yeah, this is just the way you try and stab somebody with the Holtzman shield 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 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 old enough for Dune? I don't know, like there because there's a lot of heady st up 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 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 us 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 that is even a thing that sounds like an actually moron perhaps, But this was provided by Andrew Bourgeon in that nineteen article in the Washingtonian. Uh, this is out it goes. When does a bad joke become a

dad joke? I give up when it's a parent very 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 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 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, you know, 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 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 Vault 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 on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at

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