![]() ![]() My granddad, for example, liked to pretend he thought my name was Mildred. Many dad jokes operate on “anti-humor,” or the deliberate denial of a clever punch line: “What did the farmer say when he lost his tractor? ‘Where’s my tractor?’” Others boil down to just playful, willful misunderstanding of a situation, for seemingly no reason. When dad jokes get affectionately mocked or mockingly appreciated online, they’re often characterized as ultimately harmless but only barely clever-i.e., “indescribably cheesy and/or dumb,” “ corny jokes you hate with every fiber of your being but also can’t help but laugh at,” with a tendency to “generate groans instead of guffaws” and “pitying glances, not affectionate smiles.” And there are, to be sure, many varieties of jokes that get called dad jokes. The rise and fall of the 2000s’ best bad joke A specific tone and interpersonal dynamic converge to make a joke a dad joke-and the recent ubiquity of dad jokes might even reveal something about the states of modern fatherhood and humor. Twitter users, meanwhile, frequently call each other (and themselves) out for their simplest and squeaky-cleanest puns by tweeting “#dadjoke.”ĭad jokes are simultaneously beloved and maligned, deeply ingrained in the intimacies of family life and yet universal and public enough to have a hashtag. The online video series Dad Jokes, which pits comedians and celebrities against each other in dad-joke-telling competitions where “if you laugh you lose,” launched in 2017 and today has some 999,000 followers on Facebook. The Reddit page r/dadjokes, a forum where users go to share and enjoy “the jokes that make you laugh and cringe in equal measure,” has more than 1 million subscribers and amasses several new posts every hour. In recent years, the mass-sharing capabilities of the internet have facilitated a renewed (eye-rolling, faux-begrudging) appreciation of the dad joke. Which makes it a shining example of one of America’s great familial oral traditions: the dad joke. ![]() It would be difficult to make the case that the “guy who died in the round barn” joke, a classic Midwest joke, is funny in its own right-though I would argue it’s pretty funny how much my dad still loves telling it. (He also boasted that he’d told my mom this joke, to her great amusement, when they were dating as teenagers my mom then yelled into the phone that she had in fact heard it before, even at the time. When I interviewed my father for this story, he told me he’d heard it from his dad, also a farmer, when he was about 8. My dad, once a farmer, told me this joke for the first time when I was about 8. Eventually he can’t resist any longer, and he lets the punch line rip: “Couldn’t find a corner to pee in!” There is silence, maybe a mutual Here we go glance shared between the rest of us, as my dad gets a merry little gleam in his eye. ![]() ![]() As soon as he spots it in his peripheral vision from the driver’s seat, it’s like clockwork: “Hey, you know a guy died in there?” he says, feigning nonchalance as he points to the round barn just off the highway. Every time we drive through farm country in my dad’s home state of Indiana, we know it’s coming. ![]()
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