By Brian Boone

It’s a father’s right, and responsibility, to annoy his children, adult children, spouse, and friends, with corny, obvious, and forced pun-based jokes. “Dad jokes” are one of the best parts of fatherhood, and by telling them, your dad is just keeping up a great historical legacy. Just in time for Father’s Day, let’s explore why dad jokes are so funny (or so not funny). 

Cracking Up

In the U.K., bad jokes aren’t necessarily associated with goofy dads, but Christmas. In the 19^th century London candymaker Tom Smith sold elaborately wrapped French bonbons, and included slips of paper inscribed with romantic sentiments. They proved popular, so Smith sized up the merchandise into paper tubes and added in small trinkets. When pulled open, the package would make a “cracking” sound, hence the name: Crackers. 

Smith started selling the best ones at Christmas and by the 1890s he sold 13 million a year in 170 different styles. To add variance, he replaced the love notes with Shakespeare quotes, famous poems, silly riddles, and, most notably, jokes written by prominent of the day. By the turn of the 20^th century, vaudeville had become the dominant form of entertainment, and touring comedians told their old, hacky, jokes to audiences every night — and those were included in Smith’s crackers, too. 

So Bad It’s Good

The thing about the jokes is that they were terrible. Because they had to be easy to read and appropriate for all audiences, young and old, the simpler the joke the better. It became a tradition for everyone assembled at a Christmas dinner or party to read their cracker joke aloud. Invariably, everyone groans. 

In the U.S., in the 21^st century, the kind of jokes found in crackers are the kind of cheesy old jokes dads seem to love to tell. For example:

What do snowmen wear on their heads? Ice caps!

Did you hear about the magic tractor? It turned into a field!

So why are dad jokes so unfunny, and why is it the worse they are, the more fun they are to tell (if you’re a dad) or hear (if you’re not a dad)? Richard Wiseman knows. In the early 2000s, he started a project called the Laugh Lab. Striving to study the psychology of comedy, Wiseman set out to find the world’s funniest jokes, across languages and cultures. After analyzing the contributions of more than 350,000 jokester participants, Wiseman concluded that puns are almost universally heralded as the lowest form of humor. It’s kind of counterintuitive, but dad jokes, which usually rely on terrible puns, are so loved because they are so desperately, boldly, and obviously not funny. According to Wiseman, bad dad jokes are a uniter. Say someone at a dinner party tells a joke and it falls flat. That’s the teller’s fault. But if the joke is bad, and everyone is of the understanding it’s going to be bad beforehand — like when it’s from a cracker, or a dad says, “Hey, I’ve got a good one” — they’re conditioned to react. Everyone groans, nobody laughs, and everyone assembled understands that it’s a bad joke. Dad doesn’t look bad, neither does the audience — it’s the joke that’s awful, not the people. 

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To Coin a Phrase

Dads have been making dad jokes since probably forever. But the notion of “dad jokes” as an identifier dates back to 1987. Jim Karbaugh wrote a Father’s Day column for the Gettysburg Times discussing the universal commonality of dads liking to change the temperature of a situation with a dumb joke. “As we approach Father’s Day, I would like to propose that ‘Dad’ Jokes not be banned. They should be revered, preserved.”

Here are a few more dad jokes for your “enjoyment”:

Why do barbers make good drivers? They know all the short cuts!

What did the tree do when the bank was closed? It started its own branch. 

I’m considering getting a job cleaning mirrors. It’s something I can see myself doing. 

In an emergency, what’s better than an EMT? A pair-a-medics!