Dad Jokes Are the Glue That Holds Us Together

Why employ dad jokes at all? One reason is that a dad joke can spark intellectual curiosity. When my dad said, “Hey, Bart, sawhorse is the past tense of sea horse,” I wanted to learn why that was funny. This desire not to miss out fostered a curiosity about anything that delighted or perplexed me. I wanted to “get it,” especially when “it” was slippery.

Bart (at right) still sharing laughs with his dad, Michael, in this 2010 photo.

Courtesy Bart King

The simple fact is that dad jokes require no explanation. After all, playgrounds don’t have plaques to justify their existence, as playfulness requires no defense. The important thing about dad jokes is how they can connect people and strengthen our relationships, especially those between adults and children.

With that in mind, it’s vital for us adults to model proper audience reactions. If a child tells you a dad joke, be sure to groan or laugh — or both. For example, a girl at a middle school recently told me this joke:

Q: When did Anakin Skywalker become evil?

A: In the Sith grade!

After the girl dropped her punch line, I clapped, chuckled and thanked her. This wasn’t an act! It was funny, plus telling a joke takes courage, and I appreciated it.

Dad jokes are good-natured, inclusive and non-offensive. While they often rely on wordplay, double entendres do not qualify (they’re too pun-ographic). Dad jokes are not political, religious or sarcastic. Their real humor might not be in the joke itself. Instead, the humor might be in its “ta-dah!” delivery, or in the amused outrage that it provokes. Despite their branding, dad jokes are not gender-specific. Moms are out there delivering fresh chuckles daily.

The German word schadenfreude is defined as “pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune.” Perhaps there is a version of it called dad-enfreude: the loving glee that a person derives from gently tormenting their children. If so, maybe my father was getting an innocent form of payback for the small frustrations that his children unwittingly inflicted.

As I grew older, my siblings and I publicly decried our father’s jokes (“Da-ad! Geez!”), even as, privately, we knew that his humor was a way of paying attention to us.

To put it another way, when I was 4, I puzzled over what Dad was trying to tell me with his “toe truck” joke.

Today, I can read between the lines and know that he was really saying, “I love you.”

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.