When we’re young kids, our fathers are our heroes. They teach us how to swim and ride a bike, they fix our broken toys, kill nasty spiders on the walls before they come and attack us, and don’t tell Mom when we mess something up. They pretty much do everything, and so we look up to them for everything. But then comes our 18th birthday and before we know it, we see Dad trying to be the life of the party with his short jokes and witty humor (or so he thinks) and impress everybody present, when all he really manages to do is embarrass us. Then years later, when we’re all grown up, throwing an engagement party and don’t seem to take his puns as devastatingly shameful as before, we’re actually glad when we see him grabbing his glass to make a toast. Encouraged by our applause, he goes on into a night we’ll always remember and have his “dad jokes” on video to play and rewind for years to come.
That’s exactly how the term “dad joke” was born. Brought to life by the modern wonder of the Internet in the early 2000’s, people used it to refer to jokes or punchlines that are very predictable and unlikely to actually make someone laugh – in other words, unsuccessful attempts at being funny when, it’s anything but that. And since Dads are the most common source of such comical gags and outdated one-liners, it was inevitable that they would be included in the definition. It was, however, in the past couple of years that the phrase really came to be. In fact, “dad jokes” have now become an idiom so popularly used worldwide and even defined by the Urban Dictionary as “an embarrassingly bad joke.” Many nations across the world have their own meaning for these kinds of jokes; in Indonesian, for instance, it’s jayus – a joke told so poorly and badly that you just can’t help but laugh.
Funny jokes falling into the “dad humor” category are generally inoffensive and with deliberate intension of sounding corny and unfunny; maybe even get an eye roll here and there. So our dads are not as lame and boring as we think them to be, you see. They just have a different sense of humor which sometimes comes borderline to anti-jokes. Indeed, many dad jokes have similarities to what is considered anti-humor: they are told with the purpose of surprising the audience in a negative way: leading them to expect a funny ending when there isn’t any at all, just a predictably cheesy tag line. Of course, at FunnyJokes2Go we have a strong appreciation for the irony and unoriginality behind a plain dad joke and so we were able to gather a whole bunch of them for those of you who do too. If you share the exact same interest and liking towards jokes with predictable outcomes, you’re going to love reading what many fathers could come up with. It’s nice to see yours isn’t the only one, right? Yes, they may lack in normal social skills and an understanding for your typically acceptable sense of humor, but we still love our dads, don’t we?
