Bengaluru: A psychology professor and a graduate student wanted to know what makes a dad joke tick. They analysed over 32,000 posts made on the subreddit r/dadjokes and found that the best ones have puns and involve family members.
So what makes something a dad joke? When it becomes apparent.
The study, yet to be published in a peer-reviewed publication, was led by Paul Silvia, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Meriel Burnett, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
They identified three qualities that make up the best dad jokes — puns, literalisation and pedantic humor
Using Reddit comments and upvotes as popularity metrics, they determined that the question-and-answer framing is what gets the most laughs.
According to the study topics such as nature, health care and money resonated, but politics, religion and war did not.
Steven Sultanoff, a clinical psychologist and professor at Pepperdine University, said dad jokes may help strengthen the bond between fathers and their children in much the same way that the game peekaboo does for babies and their caregivers.
“That experience becomes part of a child’s fabric, and as they grow older, without realizing it, they have this level of kindness, playfulness, creativity that they then offer to others,” he told Washington Post.
The researchers also found that gender and parenthood affected people’s perception of the jokes—“dads find dad jokes funnier.”
The study noted that people who “found the jokes funnier tended to be more agreeable, conscientious, conservative, and religious…they were more likely to have kids, greater education and subjective affluence.”