What’s Brown and Sticky? Peering Into the Ineluctable Comedic Mystery of Dad Humor with a Handful of Machine Learning Models, Hundreds of Humans, and Tens of Thousands of Dad Jokes

A stick, of course. This masterpiece of human creativity is an example of a dad joke, a clean, good-natured joke founded on puns, literalism, and wordplay. After unpacking the structures, contents, and comedic devices that distinguish dad jokes from related genres, the present research explored both the features of dad jokes that make them funny and the kinds of people who find them funny. Study 1 coded over 32,000 jokes scraped from the Reddit r/dadjokes community. Ridge regression models found that a joke’s upvotes and comments were modestly predictable from its text and topic features (test sample R2 = 4.02% and 4.42%). After curating a hypercube subsample of 501 dad jokes, Study 2 found that both text features (e.g., concreteness, semantic distance, question framing) and topic features (e.g., moms, pregnancy, and numbers) predicted the funniness ratings made by adults (n = 621) much more effectively (cross-validated R2 = 28.2%). Study 3 found that individual differences in people’s funniness ratings were associated with cultural conventionality (e.g., parenthood, more education, affluence, religiosity, and conservatism) and social boldness (e.g., need for uniqueness, low honesty-humility, and boldness; cross-validated R2 = 32.4%), and that dads found the dad jokes funnier. Seemingly simple wordplay humor illuminates the psychology of verbal creativity and extends the psychology of aesthetics into art encounters that provoke feelings of amusement, playfulness, and absurdity. The coded dad jokes are freely available for researchers interested in studying humor or hassling their teenagers.