If it evokes a reaction somewhere between cringing and earnest laughter, and you simultaneously want to tell the person sharing the joke to tell you more and also shut up because they’re embarrassing you in front of your friends, congratulations, you’re in the presence of a Dad joke.Īre Dad jokes good for you? Inarguably.

To paraphrase US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart when expounding on how to identify pornography in 1964, you’ll know it when you see it. If you’ve ever had a father (or currently are one), you don’t need me to explain a Dad Joke. For most of his life (or at least as long as I knew him), he was a huge advocate and gleeful teller of Dad Jokes. But more importantly, we knew it would’ve made our dad laugh. “He died as he lived,” we’d say, nodding meaningfully.

So we started telling people that he'd been killed by a colon parasite. We didn't want to be cheered up with idiotic aphorisms that put a positive spin on his medical condition.

He died of an enlarged heart, and when the news spread in our neighborhood, well-meaning friends and acquaintances would walk up to my brother and me and tell us, “Your dad died as he lived, with a big heart.” It never failed to annoy us. This is a story about one of my favorite dad jokes.

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