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," but humor researcher Marc Hye-Knudson said 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)," he explained.
It might seem tempting to simply dismiss dad jokes as bad jokes and accuse dads of just having a bad sense of humour, but Hye-Knudsen believes 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," he said.
According to the scientist, dad jokes work on at least three levels: as puns, as anti-humor, and as a kind of weaponized anti-humor when dads use them to teasingly annoy and/or embarrass their children.
Normally, when someone shifts to their humoros side, it is typically signalled through a change in tone or the use of what Hye-Knudsen calls discursive markers (e.g. "have you heard the one about…").
"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," he said.
"In this sense, dad jokes can be considered a type of 'anti-humor' – humor derived from violating the norms of humor production itself."
Wordplay, the main focus of this Facebook page, is especially nice. When behavioral scientist Dr. Cody Gibson was still pursuing his doctoral degree at Northern Illinois University, he was "cutting up" with psychology professor Brad Sagarin, and they set out to determine whether punsters took sadistic enjoyment from the pained responses of listeners.
However, after conducting two related surveys on humor with a total of more than 300 college-student respondents, Gibson and Sagarin discovered otherwise.
First, most punsters were not found to have a liking for causing pain in others. As for people on the receiving end, "Puns were found to be one of the types of jokes most enjoyed by audiences," Gibson explained.
"We learned that groans in response to puns might actually be insincere, or even an indication of approval," he added. "It may seem like it's popular to hate on puns, but it's sort of a tongue-in-cheek way of saying, 'That's a good one.'"
Along with observational humor, puns appeared to be enjoyed by more than 90% of their respondents.
Interestingly, the researchers did find traces of everyday sadism—a personality trait that describes an individual's tendency to find enjoyment in the suffering of others—in some other types of jokes, such as scatological and insult humor. These types of jokes were found to be more divisive than others and avoided by nearly half of survey participants.
"Humor is pretty complicated and can serve different functions for tellers and listeners," Sagarin said. "It may be appealing to different people for different reasons."
These posts, however, seem pretty harmless!
