By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Patient readers, I confess that I had another book-length post teed up, but I remain so irritated[1] by my connectivity failure (now solved, here I am), that I decided to be lazy, and what better way to be lazy than to compile a Father’s Day-appropriate listicle? (Yes, that is where the possive apostropher goes; a single father, at least notionally your own, and not fathers as a collective[2].)
Herewith (not counting the Dad Joke in today’s Links) are my sixteen favorites from this year’s harvest:
1) Shouldn’t the roof of your mouth actually be called the ceiling?
2) I adopted a dog from a blacksmith. As soon as I brought him home, he made a bolt for the door.
3) What state is known for its small drinks? Minnesota.
4) How can you tell if a pig is hot? It’s bacon.
5) What happened at the French cheese factory that exploded? Debris everywhere!
6) I went to buy a pair of camouflage pants, but I couldn’t find any.
7) Age isn’t just a number—it’s a word.
8) Everyone knows Murphy’s Law, where “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” But do you know Cole’s Law? It’s thinly sliced cabbage.
9) What do you call a cross between a joke and a rhetorical question?
10) How do you make a robot angry? Keep pushing his buttons.
11) She said she missed me. Normally that would be good, but she’s reloading.
12) What did one cannibal say to the other while they were eating a clown? “Does this taste funny to you?”
13) I hate hotel bath towels. So thick and fluffy. I can’t even close my suitcase.
14) Two cups of yogurt walk into a country club. “We don’t serve your kind here,” the bartender says.
“Why not?” one yogurt asks. “We’re cultured.”
15) I’d love to share what made me laugh during the pandemic, but they’re all inside jokes.
16) What’s the difference between the bird flu and the swine flu? One requires tweetment and the other an oinkment[3].
(Sources: here, here, here, here, and the Twitter). This being 2024, I asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT what it couldn’t have thought. Here are the results:
I took the screen dump with my eyes carefully averted, and so I can happily say that I’m pleased I didn’t pick any of the jokes that ChatGPT picked. I can also say, even more happily, that ChatGPT is even more stupid than the Dad Jokes: As the helpful annotations show, it doesn’t understand “this year’s” (although ChatGPT jokes #2, #3, and #5 were also in my sources. I had rejected them). CNN’s 2019 “Dad Joke Generator” is more honest; at least it’s openly picking the jokes from a list.
And now to make all the jokes unfunny by trying to explain them….
This is my second aggregation of Dad Jokes; here is the first. That first time, I found them hard to sort them into buckets. This year is easier: There are bad puns (#1 – #5), twisted semantics (#7 – #9), and quasi-psychosocial commentary (#10 – #14). I also curated two jokes on pandemics (#15 – #16), both of which make me feel a bit foily, and wonder who propagates these jokes, anyhow: #15 implies both that “the pandemic” is over, and that the salient feature was (the pissant, at least in the United States) lockdowns. #16 erases all forms of prevention.
All of which makes me think that a comparative and synoptic view of Dad Jokes would be useful to historians of the zeitgeist, although that history was yet to be written[4]. For example, JSTOR, in “The Dubious Art of the Dad Joke:
Bad jokes have come to be strongly associated with middle-aged men with children. Though it’s mostly since 2014 that the mildly pejorative term “Dad Jokes” really caught the attention of the general public enough to enter dictionaries, the idea of an uncool father regaling his kids with corny jokes seems to be widely relatable to lots of people. And when they’re so bad they’re good, these otherwise ridiculous jokes have sometimes become perversely popular and shared by more than just the dads of the world.
Well, no. Because if one checks an actual dictionary:
Absent history (or, as in the first post of what I suppose is becoming a series, philosophy), we can look to pop psychology and sociology. JSTOR, for example, urges that Dad Jokes increase social capital:
Successful jokes, especially when new to the listener, can increase the social status of the teller in the hierarchy of a group, allowing them control over the social interaction. If you’re a good comedian, people are going to give you more opportunities to tell jokes. The performance of joke telling actually usurps the normal turn-taking customs of conversation by reserving the right to speak and forcing listeners to play along with the format of the joke (for example in a knock-knock joke or riddle). For the time of the joke, it’s an exercise in defining a reality that is “fiercely conservative,” according to some researchers, maintaining our conventional views of the world by laughing at what’s different.
(The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy called this process the “Superiority Theory” of humor). I’m not sure Lenny Bruce or George Carlin would agree that jokes are “fiercely conservative,” but here is a case where Dad Jokes reveal an actual policy difference between conservatives and liberals. From Reason, “Federally Funded Dad Jokes“:
“Did you hear the one about the world’s greatest watch thief? He stole all the time.”
But even that guy might be impressed by the sticky fingers of the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse (NRFC), a tiny corner of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that managed to pilfer nearly $75 million in taxpayer money last year to maintain, among other things, an official government repository of “Dad Jokes.”
It’s funny—but not in a good way.
The agency’s website is the source of the cringey joke above, along with other forehead-slappers such as “Why don’t you ever see elephants hiding in trees? Because they are really good at it,” and “Have you seen the new type of broom? It’s sweeping the nation.”
In fairness, the National Strategic Dad Joke Reserve (not the real name, sadly) is just one of the NRFC’s responsibilities. The agency’s website offers a list of fun activities for fathers and kids to do together, along with more serious stuff such as public service announcements about the importance of being a good dad and access to mental health resources.
It’s not “taxpayer money,” ffs; that’s an irritable mental gesture that libertarians and conservatives share. However, I feel sure that for conservatives, if not for libertarians, State support for [genuflects] Fatherhood, and fathers who wish to accumulate social capital, would be a Good Thing, not to be ridiculed (and might in fact be). From the Conversation, “An homage to the Dad Joke, one of the great traditions of fatherhood“:
There’s a reason they’re called Dad Jokes and not father jokes.
“Father” retains the seriousness and stature of a patriarch and all of the power imbalances that accompany it: physical dominance, discipline and dependence. In contrast, “dad” implies affection and care. He’s still a male authority figure, but without the toxicity that patriarchy can often imply.
We see the Dad Joke, then, as an occasion for the dad to assert his fatherly privilege over his family and anyone else within earshot.
It’s a win-win situation for the dad. If the joke gets a laugh, well, good.
But if the joke doesn’t get a laugh … that’s good, too: Dad has intentionally invited this possibility, which is technically known as “unlaughter” [word of the day] and refers to jokes that create embarrassing and socially awkward situations. In this case, the way he flusters his children is his reward.
He’s commanding the room, as a patriarch would, but doing so in the gentlest, most playful way possible.
Then, of course, “it’s all about the children.” From Inc. (of all places, but perhaps not), “A Father’s Day Reminder From Psychology: Dad Jokes Help Kids Boost Their Emotional Intelligence and Be More Successful“:
As you have no doubt observed, a great many top-quality Dad Jokes are puns. And puns, no matter how cheesy, are actually linguistically complex [#1 – #5, and even moreso #7 – #9]. To appreciate them, you need to understand and identify the multiple meanings of a given word and grasp why they might be in conflict. When you’re 13 that may be beyond obvious, but when you’re 3, it’s a new skill that Dad Jokes can help you build.
This is Stanford’s Incongruity Theory, with the incongruous as a means to an end.
But that doesn’t mean Dad Jokes stop being useful when kids age out of “Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine.” Teens may be more mortified by these sorts of jokes than fascinated by them, but as [psychologists Shane Rogers and Marc Hye-Knudsen] note, publicly (but gently) embarrassing your kid is actually the point.
Fathers “revel in the embarrassment their Dad Jokes can produce around their image-conscious and sensitive adolescent children,” they write (surprising no one). Partly, of course, because it’s fun, but also because learning to handle embarrassment is a key component in emotional intelligence.
“Helping children learn how to deal with embarrassment is no laughing matter. Getting better at this is a very important part of learning how to regulate emotions and develop resilience,” point out Roger and Hye-Knudson.
Enduring your dad’s humor in front of your friends teaches you to sit with uncomfortable feelings. But it also demonstrates that jokes can be a useful social tool.
“Jokes can be a useful coping strategy during awkward situations — for instance, after someone says something awkward or to make someone laugh who has become upset,” Rogers and Hye Knudson add.
Which is to say, Dad Jokes boost kids’ emotional intelligence, and the science is quite clear that emotional intelligence is a huge factor in a great many kinds of success in life.
Interesting theory, though I would imagine there are confounders.
Ever told your dad, “Dad, I’m hungry,” only to get the response “Hi Hungry, I’m Dad”? If so, you’ve experienced a classic groan-worthy, eye-roll-inducing, really-should-have-seen-it-coming, so-bad-it’s-good Dad Joke.
Finally, these two passages fascinate me. From the Seattle Times, “Why Dad Jokes crack us up: The surprising psychology explained” (June 10, 2024), the lead:
Ever told your dad, “Dad, I’m hungry,” only to get the response “Hi Hungry, I’m Dad”? If so, you’ve experienced a classic groan-worthy, eye-roll-inducing, really-should-have-seen-it-coming, so-bad-it’s-good dad joke.
And from the Conversation’s piece (June 13, 2024), the lead:
“Dad, I’m hungry.”
“Hi, hungry. I’m Dad.”
If you haven’t been asleep for the past 20 years, you’ll probably recognize this exchange as a Dad Joke.
A future historian of the Zeitgeist might urge that such a concidence cannot be a coincidence. Both passages consider being able to feed children the salient feature of fatherhood (being “a good provider”), and neither passage goes on to discuss the joke; they both shy away from the topic, as if from something not pleasant or not mentionable (which is odd, because so much of humor, even in gentle Dad Jokes, is about transgressing the boundaries of what is pleasant or cannot be mentioned; see #10 – #13 above, which are about anger, violence, cannibalism, and theft, respectively). I would speculate that the authors’ silence reflects anxiety about the future role of fathers; will they, in future — for some unknown but not unimaginable reasons — not be able to provide for children in the future, as (at least in terms of social norms) they have in the past?
And ending on a note like that, perhaps we need some Dad Jokes from you!
NOTES
[1] The final straw, the bale having been rentier extraordinaire Adobe’s InDesign 19.4 consistently crashing on launch without even a message. Step 1 in debugging was to install the current version of MacOS, where I discovered the download — I still had connectivity then — took four hours. So I left my desk and did other stuff, only to discover that the although the download was complete, there was no dialog waiting for me to tell the Mac to go ahead with the installation. So I went ahead with a second download, which again took four hours, and went through steps 2 and many of the InDesign debugging checklist in parallel (basically, check your fonts and throw all the support files away). Then another couple hours whirring away to reinstall the software, reboot several times, etc. Now the uninstalled/reinstalled InDesign works; I just checked it again. But six hours to fix a problem that I didn’t create and should not have to fix.
My conclusion: My workflow depends on a very complex system (both InDesign and MacOS being decades worth of code). And yet, if everything we read about Covid sequelae is true, the general population under our regime of repeated infection will be more sick, more angry, and less performant with respect to executive function (“the stupidest timeline”). Will we be able to maintain the complex systems on which civilization depends under these conditions? Perhaps I should simplify my workflow. And now to collect some jokes!
[2] Like Mother’s Day, but not Siblings Day or Grandparents’ Day.
[3] Here’s a seventeenth, but even though I’m really here just for the Linotype machine:
[4] The genre seems to be making it’s way out into the world where Bernays Sauce is served (Panera Bread; UCLA).
APPENDIX
Dad Jokes, technically, are close kin to one-liners. For grins, here are some clips from a master of that art, Steven Wright:
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Rodney Dangerfield is another king of the one-liner, but I’m not linking to him because the jokes are just too tragic.
