I'm known in my family for bad dad jokes. I text them to relatives and get the eye-roll emoji back. So when two psychologists published a paper this year on what makes a dad joke funny, I had to look.

Paul Silvia and Meriel Burnett scraped more than 32,000 jokes from Reddit's r/dadjokes, coded every one for length, concreteness, and 156 topics (dads, chickens, pirates, Halloween), and tried to predict which ones got upvotes. That worked badly, and the reason why is a lesson in measurement. So they picked 501 jokes, had 621 adults rate them, and tried again. This time the features mattered: concrete language helped, a punchline that lands far from where the setup pointed helped, and ending the punchline with a question hurt.

Then they turned it around and asked who finds these jokes funny. Two clusters showed up. One is cultural conventionality: parents, the more educated, the religious, the politically conservative, and (this is in the paper) anyone who identifies as a cat person or a dog person. The other is what the authors call social boldness: people who like to stand out and don't mind tweaking other people. I run through the first cluster on myself and explain why the religion and politics findings are probably about something other than wordplay.

Along the way you'll hear the three funniest and three least funny jokes in the study, plus a few of mine, and a skeptic's section on what the study can and can't tell us: correlation versus causation, a personality measure that didn't hold up well, and the fact that about 70 percent of what makes a joke funny to a given person is still unexplained.

Source: Silvia, P. J., and 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. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000896

Psychology in Everyday Life: The Psych Files

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