ESIC 2021 DOI: 10.26613/esic/5.2.248 Dad Jokes and the Deep Roots of Fatherly Teasing Marc Hye-Knudsen Abstract Dad jokes, I argue, are a manifestation of a much older fatherly impulse to tease one’s children. On the surface, dad jokes are puns that are characterized by only violating a pragmatic norm and nothing else, which makes them lame and unfunny. Only violating a pragmatic norm and nothing else, however, is itself a violation of the norms of joke-telling, which makes dad jokes a type of anti-humor. Fathers (i.e., “dads”) may in turn seek to embarrass their children by purposively violating the norms of joke-telling in this way, thus weaponizing the lame pun against their children as a type of good-natured teasing. Given their personality profle, it makes sense that fathers should be particularly prone to weap- onize dad jokes teasingly against their children like this, with the phenomenon bearing an illuminating resemblance to the rough-and-tumble play that fathers have engaged their children in since before the dawn of our species. Keywords: dad jokes, puns, humor, anti-humor, teasing, benign violation, fatherhood, rough- and-tumble play, evolutionary psychology In recent years, dad jokes have gained increasing notoriety both as a concept and as a phenom- enon, yet they remain poorly understood. In 2019, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary added an entry on dad jokes with the following definition: “a wholesome joke of the type said to be told by fathers with a punchline that is often an obvious or predictable pun or play on words and usually judged to be endearingly corny or unfunny.” This definition raises a number of questions: Firstly, why is this type of joke specifically asso- ciated with “dads”? Are fathers actually more prone to employ them, and if so, why? Furthermore, how can we make sense of the popularity of dad jokes given that they are explicitly said to be “unfunny”? Even those defi- nitions of the genre that do not specifically use the word “unfunny” include some reference hereto, instead calling them “lame” (Dictionary. com 2020), “hackneyed” (OED 2020), or “embarrassingly bad” (Urban Dictionary 2020). Yet many, if not most, people must clearly find dad jokes funny in some sense since they continue to share them and to seek them out. On Reddit.com, the community r/DadJokes, which is specifically dedicated to sharing dad jokes, has a staggering 3.4 million members. Similarly, Google Books lists no fewer than 300 books solely dedicated to compiling examples of the genre, and the website Buzzfeed alone has an equal number of articles that are just lists of dad jokes. An exemplary dad joke from one such article goes like this: “A duck walks into a phar- macy and says, ‘Give me some lip balm—and put it on my bill’” (Bullock 2019). Are dad jokes like this funny, unfunny, or somehow both? To answer such questions and to get to the bottom of the phenomenon of dad jokes, we have to look closer at the deep roots of both dads and jokes. Taking a long view like this will allow us to bypass such common misunderstandings as the idea that dad jokes are simply bad jokes and that dads have a bad sense of humor. Drawing on the work of the psychologists Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren, which posits that humor is an