Name: Dad jokes.
Age: Old enough to know better.
Appearance: Awful, pretty – sorry, I meant “pretty awful”!
Is this like dad dancing, but for humour? Exactly – the sort of joke a middle-aged dad tells: corny, obvious, characterised by a compulsive weakness for unsophisticated wordplay.
Not funny, you mean. In the right circumstances, a dad joke can be very funny.
Can you give me an example? Certainly. I’m reading a book on the history of glue.
Sounds boring. I know, but I just can’t seem to put it down!
I don’t get it. It’s because glue is sticky, so it would make it difficult to let go of the …
No, I get why it’s a joke; I just don’t get why it’s funny. Because it’s so bad, it’s good.
No, it isn’t – it’s so bad, it’s terrible. Why would publishers put glue all over a book about glue? It would make distribution a nightmare. Perhaps you had to be there.
Where? On one of the popular online forums where dad jokes are having a strange resurgence: Reddit, or under the Twitter hashtag #dadjoke, or in the Facebook video series Dad Jokes, in which comedians go head to head trying to make each other laugh at terrible puns.
Why, of all the godforsaken periods in history, has this dreadful fate befallen ours? It has been suggested that the sheer nastiness of most online discourse has sent people in search of something bland, inoffensive and charmingly rubbish. The dad joke is all those things, and less.
But they’re just so old-fashioned, like my dad. That may be the point – dad jokes hark back to simpler times, when fathers had no parental role beyond breadwinner and weekend comic relief.
How did dads get so bad at telling jokes in the first place? It could be that having small children sets a very low bar for humour; they will laugh at anything. But as the kids get older, the dads tend to stick with the same basic formula.
That makes sense. Or it could be that once they have been spurned as unfunny by their adult children, fathers continue to deploy dad humour to provoke embarrassment, out of revenge.
You mean my father pulled that stunt on purpose? Which stunt?
He showed up at my fancy dress party with a woman on his back. Why?
He said he had come as a tortoise. But who was the woman?
That’s what I asked! And what did he say?
He said: “That’s Michelle.” I’m not laughing.
Do say: “Don’t call me later, call me Dad!”
Don’t say: “Call, don’t call, whatever. I’ll be dead soon.”
