With a pun like the one about what sprinters eat before a race, we violate that norm by saying at least two different things at the same time for humorous effect. This norm is an essential prerequisite for human communication. During normal conversation, we can assume that the person we are talking to will only say one thing at a time, their words thus having a singular unambiguous meaning.
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Puns violate the linguistic norm against ambiguity. In the face of a benign violation, amusement motivates us to explore and play with its implications while our laughter invites others to join us.Īt their most basic level, dad jokes are simply lame puns. Humor is a lot like rough-and-tumble play, except instead of only consisting of benign physical violations it has been expanded during human evolution to include all kinds of benign violations, like violations of linguistic norms (e.g., puns and wordplay), social norm violations (e.g., farting in public), or moral norm violations (e.g., dark humor). Play signals like the “play face” serve during rough-and-tumble play to signal that all physical violations are benign, ensuring that the play-fighting does not escalate into actual violence. This allows young animals to practice these vital skills in a safe setting while also serving as a medium for social bonding. In rough-and-tumble play, the participants will play at benignly violating each other’s physical boundaries by wrestling, chasing, biting, fleeing, and the like. Indeed, a distinct homologue of human laughter can be found in the laugh-like panting vocalization that accompanies the so-called “play face” of some of our closest related primates like chimpanzees.
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Its evolutionary origins lie in mammalian social play, which often takes the form of play fighting (“rough-and-tumble play”). Humor is an evolved psychological response of ours, consisting of the positive emotion of humorous amusement and the physical tendency to laugh. The first thing we have to ask ourselves is this: What makes something funny? In this post, I will walk you through my central argument. Secondly, what are we to make of the association between dads and dad jokes? One possible answer is that dad jokes are simply bad jokes and that dads have a bad sense of humor, but I argue against this interpretation in my new paper for this journal, “Dad Jokes and the Deep Roots of Fatherly Teasing.”ĭad jokes might seem like a strange topic for a journal called Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, but to understand the dad joke I argue that we have to look at the deep roots of each of its constituent concepts, dads and jokes. What gives? Are dad jokes funny, unfunny, or somehow both?
![lame dad jokes lame dad jokes](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mT5XwMU32eQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
This is how Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines dad jokes: “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.” That definition raises a number of questions.įirstly, how are we to make sense of the apparent popularity of dad jokes given that they are explicitly said to be “unfunny”? Millions of people seek them out and share them avidly with each other on websites like Twitter and Reddit. Or at least, that is what seems to be implied by the concept of “dad jokes,” a term that has become popular enough in recent years to make it into the dictionaries. If that joke made you chuckle instead of rolling your eyes, then you may be a dad.
![lame dad jokes lame dad jokes](https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.mp-cdn.net/d1/eb/b7c0a7cf96921e7c22ecffeebe7f-are-lame-jokes-that-lame.jpg)
What do sprinters eat before a race? Nothing, they fast.