From the archive: Dad jokes, revisited

In 2021, I wrote what is, to my knowledge, the first academic article ever on the concept of dad jokes. As it turns out, the editor at The Psychologist is one of the genre's most ardent supporters (and an avid practitioner, as his tweets attest), so he immediately reached out to me to write about it for the magazine. I wrote up the piece, and after some rounds of edits, I largely forgot about it as the magazine put in on the back burner for a later issue.

Imagine my surprise when April 2023 came around and the piece had not only made it into the issue but onto the cover of the magazine. In true dad form, my editor had even forced a befitting dad joke into the headline. To this day, it remains the most popular thing I've ever written, and it has consistently ranked among the magazine's most read articles since. Who could have known that the world was so full of dad jokers longing to see their craft taken seriously.

The piece got a lot of attention online, leading to multiple other news sources writing about it, some in less responsibly restrained tones than others. Just as surprised as I had been to find my article gracing the cover of The Psychologist, so too I was surprised to see myself referred to in various news sources as a 'British psychologist', 'Dr Hye-Knudsen', who had supposedly done a study 'scientifically proving' that dad jokes are good for kids.

Of course, I had done no such thing. (Nor am I British, a psychologist, or a doctor.) But I had written a piece extolling the virtues, and not least the complexities, of the dad joke. As with many other aspects of popular culture, a psychological perspective on dad jokes reveals layers of meaning beneath their surface simplicity. The dad joke is more than just a lame pun: It is a microcosm of humor's broader role in human interaction, where laughter can both unite and instruct, delight and discomfort.

There hasn't exactly been a major boom in research on dad jokes since I wrote my piece. However, there is a noteworthy exception: Two psychologists, Cody Gibson and Brad J. Sagarin, published a study in Personality and Individual Differences on whether or not telling groanworthy puns is a manifestation of 'everyday sadism', the tendency to find enjoyment in the suffering of others. What they found was interesting, to say the least.

In contrast to other types of jokes, their respondents did, in fact, report desiring not just laughs in response to telling a pun but also groans (what I termed 'weaponized anti-humor' in my piece). However, this wasn't correlated with everyday sadism writ large, generally finding enjoyment in other people's suffering. To the extent that wanting a groan from your audience is an act of sadism, it would then seem to be a kind of benign sadism, not associated with the general antisocial tendency to relish in others' misfortune.

What is more, the subjects in the study actually reported enjoying puns over any other included type of joke. This wasn't a study of dads either, who could be dismissed for supposedly having a uniquely bad sense of humor. Rather, the study was conducted on a sample of university students. In other words, dad jokes are not just restricted to dads who want to watch their children cringe in embarrassment. A lot of people love dad jokes, and a part of that enjoyment seems to lie in trying to get a groan out of their audience.

Let that be a lesson to any dad joke-haters out there: You are in the minority, and the joke is on you.

Marc Hye-Knudsen is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Management, Aarhus University