I’m curious about the term, and I’m curious about the type of humor.
What makes a joke a “Dad joke”?
Also, that term seems to have a negative tone, a commentary on the quality of the joke.
Please help me understand.
They’re usually the sort of jokes that make people groan rather than laugh. Corny humour. Often based on puns.
Also sometimes they have a disproportionally long setup for a very small and often anticlimactic punchline (similar to shaggy dog stories).
The appeal of them is sort of meta-humour; we’re laughing not because the joke was funny, but because dad did the dad joke again.
When the punch line becomes apparent.
Basically, the punchline is a bad pun with a labored or contrived setup.
The other thing is that they are often presented as just part of a normal conversation (so the joke is that we’ve been bamboozled into listening to a story that was nothing more than the setup for a bad pun).
Forums are meant for general discussion. Googlable questions are more appropriate for a browser or ChatGPT.
Another factor is that they have to be wholesome. Appropriate to tell a child.
mmm
Not only tell a child, but tell them the same joke repeatedly over years.
When the kid is young, they may not remember or may remember but enjoy the repetition. Eventually when the kid is more like 8 or 10, the eye-rolling starts as soon as they recognize the set up. Yet dear old Dad perseveres through to the punchline.
Gee, thanks, dad.
Examples here: More Jokes - #5600 by Prof.Pepperwinkle
I think the first reply, by @Mangetout, gave a pretty good answer. I would just add a couple of criteria:
A “dad joke” has to be the kind of joke an ordinary person would actually tell for fun (as opposed to, say, a visual gag from a movie or a joke that only works as part of a professional stand-up comedian’s routine).
At least in my understanding, a “dad joke” is not a dirty joke. It may be risque, but not filthy or offensive.
Even before the term “dad joke” became a thing, my brothers and I would refer to specific jokes that we had heard my father tell as “Dad jokes” (e.g. one whose punchline was “That’s nacho cheese!”). I suspect we weren’t the only ones, and this may have been the context in which the phrase originated: actual jokes told by actual Dads.
When did the term “dad joke” become popular. Because these are the types of joke I (and my father) appreciated when I was a kid in the 60s, and I never heard the term.
(On edit, wiki cites a use from 1987.)
Sorry, I didn’t get the punchline.
What type of mexican food do snowmen like?
Brrr-ritos
This is a dad joke. Corny, funny the first time, non-offensive. And your dad will repeat this joke every time he sees a snowman.
Truth.
On most of the occasions when we drove over a railroad crossing, my dad would say something like “You can tell that a train came through here, because you can see its tracks.” (I will confess that I said the same thing to my kids, more than once.)
Or a burrito.
Nowadays, if you want a conversation, you don’t go to a message board, you open up Gemini and start talking to your new best friend.
This is a conversation to explore the more subtle side of the topic.
For example, I’ve made some jokes that are new, not standard cliches and I don’t repeat them for years. But some are labeled Dad jokes.
@Mangetout says corny and pun- based, which is probable a fair description. But not long drawn out.
I’ve only heard the term used within the last few years. The concept of a corny line repeated often is ancient.
Here’s one: How do you tell of a puppy is a boy or a girl? You look at the bottom of its feet.
You pick it up and turn it over.
Dad jokes exist because we want to make our children laugh, but most of our material is entirely unsuitable for that, so we create jokes that are safe, trite, and easily accessible.
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Unless the snowman is angry. Then it wants a brrr-grrr.
Don’t give it a cleaver, it might want to chop Susie.