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A few months ago, my colleague Jonas wrote a piece on a subreddit with the same kind of energy as this Twitter account. Check it out if you haven't already!
Back then, Jonas compared these "obvious" remarks to dad jokes and I gotta say, I probably agree. Dad jokes are simultaneously beloved and maligned, deeply ingrained in the intimacies of family life, and yet universal and public enough to have a cult following.
If there's one thing that describes dad jokes, it's wordplay. You know it goes, "Hey, do you know what time my dentist appointment is? Tooth-hurty." "Why do they always build fences around cemeteries? Because people are dying to get in."
Stanley Dubinsky, an English professor at the University of South Carolina and the father of two young-adult sons, is a real enthusiast of dad jokes, mostly of the non-pun variety; he likes to deliberately mispronounce words sometimes, just to hear his kids groan and scoff exasperatedly.
"I take a little bit of perverse pleasure in causing them some embarrassment when I speak," Dubinsky said. "Your kids are embarrassed by you anyway, so the next best thing [to them laughing in earnest at your jokes] is to level with that."
But Dubinsky is also a linguist and the co-author of the book Understanding Language Through Humor, and as he explains it, there's a particular type of wordplay that gives a joke the dubious distinction of being a dad joke.
"Most jokes rely on some semantic ambiguity or grammatical ambiguity. The things people call dad jokes are the ones where the ambiguity is crushingly obvious," he explained.
Which is also the case here!
