While the original dad jokes are no doubt as old as time, the first recorded instance of the term “dad joke” comes from the Gettysburg Times (a very “Dad” sounding newspaper,) which in 1987 wrote, “Don't ban the 'Dad' jokes; preserve and revere them." Evidently, someone in that Pennsylvania town’s community had enough of horrible puns.
This is partially because, unlike traditional humor, dad jokes seem to exist only for the dad to enjoy. If anything, they might only feel that the joke landed if they managed to evoke a groan or eye-roll from their spouse or offspring.
In this sense, a perfect dad joke is a balancing act, between making something so dumb and simplistic that it’s a chore to hear, but still registers are an attempt at humor. It should be unexpected not because the dad has some clever punch-line setup, but because what the dad says is so cosmically dumb, that a regular person wouldn’t even consider it for a second.
Many dad jokes also rely on puns, the worse and more stretched, the better. Remember, the discomfort of the audience is the goal, not laughter. A topical example is as follows, “Question: What do a bed bug and the Eiffel Tower have in common? Answer: They're both Paris sites.” This is a great litmus test to see if you are prepared for fatherhood.
Puns, for all the harm they may do to some of our brain cells, have been around since the dawn of civilization. Like with so many things, we can thank the ancient Egyptians for the idea of similar sounds being used together to create new meanings. However, instead of using them as jokes, Egyptians saw them as conveying mythological and divine power. So in a sense, Egyptian puns and modern dad jokes both could be a curse to the rest of us.
There are examples of puns in everything from ancient China to Mesopotamia and even Mayan records. This makes sense when you realize that, love them or hate them, human civilization needs fathers to continue. Thus, like a parasitic organism, the dad joke has been passed down through the ages to infect one generation after another.
At a certain level, dads begin to compete with each other to create the ultimate groan-worthy joke. Given that there are probably more dads than ever before in human history, this has perhaps led to a sort of dad-joke escalation, where constant competition improves the performance of all dads, much to the rest of the population’s dismay.
Of course, parenthood doesn’t just make dads masters of horrible puns and jokes, it is a huge learning moment. Besides parenting for the first time, being a dad allows an adult to re-see much of the world through the eyes of their offspring. And, surprise, surprise, it’s a good way to see just how many things sort of don’t make sense. For example, why are burgers getting higher and higher when the average human bite has remained static for years?