I am known in my family for bad jokes. Dad jokes, mostly puns. I text them to relatives and what comes back, nearly every time, is the eye-roll emoji. One I told on this show years ago: Did you hear about the actor who fell through the trapdoor during a performance? It was just a stage he was going through.
Two psychologists have now studied this. Paul Silvia (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and Meriel Burnett (University of Massachusetts Amherst) published a paper in 2026 in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts titled “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.) Under the jokes it is a serious three-study paper, and the method is as interesting as the findings.
What counts as a dad joke
Silvia and Burnett define dad jokes as short, clean, affable jokes founded on wordplay. Short means two sentences at most, often in riddle form (What is the leading cause of dry skin? Towels). Clean is not optional: no sex, profanity, death, violence, or mocking of groups. The characters are family members, pets, and chickens; the settings are the house, the restaurant, the doctor’s office. The wordplay comes in three kinds: puns (“So long, boiling water. You will be mist.”), literalization of idioms (“I’m having a hard time deciding whether to throw away my old pillow. I think I’ll sleep on it.”), and what the authors call pedantic antihumor, the fake-out non-joke (“Dad, I’m hungry.” “Hi Hungry, I’m Dad.”). The authors note that people often find the third kind irritating. I am one of those people. Hye-Knudsen (2021) called it “weaponized antihumor”: the dad is teasing the kid and enjoying the groan.
Study 1: Scraping Reddit
Reddit’s r/dadjokes community has about 12 million subscribers and a convenient rule: the setup goes in the post title and the punchline in the post body. The authors scraped 32,533 posts from June 2023 through mid-June 2024 and tried to predict three outcomes: upvotes, comments, and whether a joke “bombed” (no more than one upvote; about 24 percent did).
The predictors were text features (setup and punchline length, whether each ended with a question mark, concreteness, readability, vocabulary variety, how far apart setup and punchline were in meaning, and how often the same setup appeared in the database) and topic features: 156 topics such as dad, wife, chicken, pirate, doctor, and Halloween, scored for every joke by an AI language model. The jokes were split 75/25 into a training set and a held-out test set, so the model was judged on jokes it had never seen.
It did poorly. The features explained about 4 percent of the variation in upvotes. The most consistent predictor was the duplicate count: classic, widely reposted jokes did best, which is circular. The authors are frank about why: upvotes are a coarse measure (most Reddit readers never vote), comments can mean praise or pile-on, and r/dadjokes is loosely moderated, so much of what is in there is not a dad joke by their definition. That motivated Study 2.
Study 2: Asking people what is funny
You cannot ask people to rate 32,000 jokes (“cruel and unusual punishment,” the authors say), so they built a subset of 501 that covered the full range of the text and topic features, cleaned by hand to remove duplicates, current-events jokes, Reddit in-jokes, and anything vulgar. They recruited 621 U.S. adults through the Prolific panel, half men and half women, with at least a quarter being parents between 37 and 59. Each person rated 40 of the 501 jokes from 1 (not at all funny) to 7 (extremely funny).
Because each joke was rated by a different random group of people, some jokes might have drawn tough graders by chance. A statistical model (a Rasch model) estimated each joke’s funniness and each rater’s leniency at the same time and adjusted one for the other. The top three jokes:
- I accidentally passed my wife a glue stick instead of her chapstick. She’s still not talking to me.
- What country’s capital is growing the fastest? Ireland. Every day it’s Dublin.
- I told a joke on a Zoom meeting but nobody laughed. It turns out I’m not remotely funny.
And the bottom three:
- What year comes right after the year 1789 when the French Revolution began? The year 17. Because 789.
- Important thing about jokes. Conciseness.
- Why do monarchs feel so important? Because small changes in their initial conditions can lead to large-scale and unpredictable variation in the future state of the system.
With human ratings as the outcome, the same kinds of features explained about 28 percent of the variation, up from 4 percent. Same predictors, better outcome measure. That jump is the most useful lesson in the paper: measure the thing you care about (amusement), not a stand-in for it (upvotes).
Three text features mattered most. Jokes were less funny when the punchline ended with a question (“I can build a boat. Canoe?”); only 13 jokes did this, and the authors are careful not to explain the finding, since the right test would be an experiment writing the same punchline both ways. Jokes were funnier when the language was concrete (glue sticks, Dublin, Zoom), which fits Westbury and Hollis (2019) on what makes single words funny. And jokes were funnier when setup and punchline were far apart in meaning, which fits the old idea of incongruity and Oring’s “appropriate incongruity”: the pieces do not fit, and yet they do. Pery and Kenett (2025) argue for a sweet spot; too much distance is just confusing, and the monarch butterfly joke is what that looks like.
Study 3: Who finds dad jokes funny
Now the authors flipped the data, treating people as the units of analysis. Participants had answered questionnaires on demographics, personality (a short HEXACO form), need for uniqueness, boldness, humor styles, political orientation, religiosity, and whether they were a cat person, a dog person, both, or neither. The model explained about 32 percent of the variation, and two clusters emerged.
Cultural conventionality. People found the jokes funnier if they were parents, more educated, financially comfortable, male, religious, politically conservative, higher in agreeableness and conscientiousness, and, compared with people who were neither cat nor dog people, any kind of pet person. I ran this inventory on myself: educated, agreeable, conscientious, both a cat and dog person, a parent. Religious, no. Conservative, no. So why those two? The authors’ explanation is about content, not wordplay. Dad jokes are clean by definition, so this cluster describes people who are culturally mainstream and drawn to humor that stays inside the lines. The mirror image appears in older work: Ruch (1988) found that sensation seekers prefer absurd and sexual humor, and Ruch and Rath (1993) found that conservative participants took more offense at sexual jokes. These are small effects in one sample of about 600 Americans, and religiosity and conservatism are correlated with each other, so the data cannot say which one is doing the work.
Social boldness. People also found the jokes funnier if they were higher in need for uniqueness and boldness, lower in honesty-humility, and less inclined to use humor to put people at ease. Someone willing to stand out and tweak other people. The authors connect this to the teasing function of dad jokes: you are enjoying someone else’s groan.
And yes, dads find dad jokes funnier. Gender alone made no difference, parents rated the jokes funnier than non-parents, and the parent effect was larger for men. The model explained about 4 percent of the variation. The authors: “In these fraught and uncertain times, rife with mistrust of expertise and reason, it is perhaps reassuring to know that science has found that dads find dad jokes funnier.”
Takeaways
There is such a thing as a better dad joke: concrete language, a punchline from somewhere unexpected, and no question mark at the end. The people who like them are, broadly, those comfortable with clean humor plus those with a mischievous streak, and those can be the same person. And the jump from 4 percent to 28 percent is the lesson for psychology students: measuring the right thing matters more than any amount of modeling.
The authors close with Peter Berger (1961): “We laugh, and for one moment the walls are really gone.” Even a pun is a small moment where the rules of language are suspended and things could be put together differently. Two more of mine, and then you can send me the eye-roll emoji. Someone asked me to name two structures capable of holding water. I said, “Well, dam.” And a friend told me he didn’t understand cloning. I said, “That makes two of us.”
If you want more dad jokes, feel free to download the ones used in the study by the authors: Open data and code for the Silvia and Burnett study.
Key terms
Incongruity. The idea, central to many theories of humor, that amusement comes from two things that do not go together, joined by a connection that makes a strange kind of sense. Elliott Oring’s version, appropriate incongruity, stresses that the connection has to be apt, not just random.
Semantic distance. How far apart two pieces of text are in meaning, calculated here by comparing the setup and punchline using a language model. Jokes with greater semantic distance were rated funnier, up to the point where the connection becomes too hard to see.
Concreteness. The degree to which language refers to things that can be seen, touched, or pictured (a glue stick) rather than abstract ideas (the future state of a system). More concrete jokes were rated funnier.
HEXACO model of personality. A six-factor model of personality: honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. It differs from the Big Five mainly by adding honesty-humility. The study used an 18-item short form whose reliability was poor for most traits.
Need for uniqueness. A personality trait reflecting how much a person wants to be different from other people. Higher need for uniqueness predicted finding dad jokes funnier.
Cross-validation. A way of checking whether a statistical model’s findings hold up on data it did not learn from. In Study 1 the jokes were split into a 75 percent training set and a 25 percent test set; in Studies 2 and 3 the data were split into ten folds and the model was tested on each fold in turn. Without this check, a model can “find” patterns that are just noise in the training data.
Exploratory versus confirmatory research. Exploratory research goes looking for patterns in data without a prior hypothesis; confirmatory research tests a specific prediction written down in advance (preregistration). Both are legitimate, but exploratory findings need to be confirmed in new studies before they are treated as established. This study is exploratory, and the authors say so.
References
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Hye-Knudsen, M. (2021). Dad jokes and the deep roots of fatherly teasing. Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 5(2), 83–98. https://doi.org/10.26613/esic.5.2.248
King, B. (2020). Bad dad jokes: That’s how eye roll. Gibbs Smith.
Oring, E. (1992). Jokes and their relations. University Press of Kentucky.
Pery, S., & Kenett, Y. N. (2025). Laughing across the bridge: The role of associative distance in humor. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000776
Rosenbusch, H., Evans, A. M., & Zeelenberg, M. (2022). The relative importance of joke and audience characteristics in eliciting amusement. Psychological Science, 33(9), 1386–1394. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221098595
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Ruch, W., & Rath, S. (1993). The nature of humor appreciation: Toward an integration of perception of stimulus properties and affective experience. HUMOR, 6(4), 363–384. https://doi.org/10.1515/humr.1993.6.4.363
Silvia, P. J., & Burnett, M. I. (2026). 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. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000896
Westbury, C., & Hollis, G. (2019). Wriggly, squiffy, lummox, and boobs: What makes some words funny? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(1), 97–123. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000467