| Lots of good comments here, but nobody has really pointed out the next level of metahumor in a dad joke. All humor is based on something unexpected. In a good pun, the wordplay is clever and unexpected. In a good punchline, the particular completion of a setup is unexpected. Sometime a dad joke is funny because telling a joke that awful is itself unexpected! It's sort of a metajoke that someone would even try to tell that joke. And the joke self-deprecating at the same time because there's real risk the audience won't even get that telling the joke is the joke. The best example of the bad joke metajoke was the Norm MacDonald roast of Bob Saget. If you know anything about roast comedy, his set was a work of comedy genius. Someone out of the loop might think Norm was just lame, but he was really doing something clever with top notch delivery. There is a nice synergy with the above when young children are involved. Those aspects (teaching, it's new to them, they just want to share a laugh) are there still even with the metajoke hanging out there for the grownups in the room to (hopefully) appreciate. I'll also add that it's good to teach kids not to take the adults too seriously. Even kings get the toots, etc. Anyway, all that being said, you can run even the bad joke metajoke into the ground, dads. At some point it stops being meta and self-deprecating and just becomes G-rated cringe trolling. I think the best comics try to delight their audiences. Be funny and delightful please. |