SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Got a question for our next guest. Why do chicken coops have two doors?
PAUL SILVIA: I have no idea.
SIMON: If they had four, they'd be chicken sedans.
SILVIA: (Laughter) Oh, dear.
SIMON: We posed the question to Paul Silvia, psychology professor at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. He may be one of the world's foremost experts on dad jokes and has gone through thousands of them for a recent research paper. Boy, what a way to make a living. And they kid me. And since it's just before Father's Day, Professor Silvia joins us now. Thanks for being with us.
SILVIA: It's a pleasure.
SIMON: You found jokes on Reddit and built a database of more than a hundred and thirty-four thousand entries?
SILVIA: Yes, yes. Using text mining techniques, we wandered on into Reddit, into their dad jokes subreddit and scraped a couple hundred thousand jokes and sort of used this big database, which is available online for the morbidly curious to sort of...
SIMON: (Laughter).
SILVIA: ...Figure out the active ingredients of dad humor, shall we say.
SIMON: Why do cows wear bells?
SILVIA: I'm afraid to ask.
SIMON: I keep putting you on the spot. 'Cause their horns don't work. What makes a good dad joke?
SILVIA: So a dad joke has got to be short. It's got to be friendly, good-natured. It's not going to be mean-spirited or cynical or unseemly, and it's got to be clean. So it's got to be family-friendly, you know, not very rude, no swearing, and it's almost always based on just the most devilish and fun wordplay.
SIMON: Yeah. You have a favorite you can share?
SILVIA: Oh, it's like asking a dad to pick their favorite child. But one of my recent favorites might be, I used to be addicted to soap, but I'm clean now.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: So I know nothing ruins humor more than analyzing it, but what makes a dad joke?
SILVIA: This is one of the things we're most curious about. So we studied psychology humor, and there's lots of ways to be funny. Like, there's lots of little humor levers that comedy writers and comedians use. There's lots of comedic devices. So we're curious to know what is it that dad jokes are doing, like, what's their big buttons they're pushing. It's pretty obvious what the big three are after you sift through 20- or 30,000 of them. And the first one is puns. There's a whole big world of puns, lots of types of puns, but puns are, like, the big comedic device in dad jokes. The other one, the second one, is literalism. This is kind of the I'm clean now joke, in fact. This is where you take some cliche, some figure of speech, and you flip it on its head and you kind of require someone to unpack it literally instead of, like, the usual cliche. And the third is this kind of irritating pedantic anti-humor, where you're sort of teasing people a little bit.
SIMON: Are you talking to me? Sorry, go ahead. Yes.
SILVIA: Yeah. This is like the patient zero dad joke is, you know, when the little kid wanders into the kitchen and says, Dad, I'm hungry. And, of course, in the true spirit of Father's Day, you say, hi, Hungry. I'm Dad.
SIMON: Oh, a classic.
SILVIA: Yes. You're going on a wholesome family nature walk and the child says, hold up. I've got something in my shoe. And naturally, of course, as a caring father, you say, is it your foot? And this kind of pedantic, practical, jokey, fake-out non-humor joke is the third kind and one of the defining features of the genre, you might say.
SIMON: I gather you think that dad jokes serve a purpose in a family.
SILVIA: I think they're great. I think that really what humor does mostly and should is it brings people together. It draws people together.
SIMON: Draws people together to groan, at least in our family, when I tell a dad joke. But yes.
SILVIA: Indeed. I think there can be a real teasing element to it where, you know, the dads tease their kids, and I think it's fair because as I've learned with my teenagers, the kids surely tease the dads back in return. There's just nothing quite as satisfying as, like, sharing laughter with children. It's a lovely thing.
SIMON: I gather we've reached you on a family road trip.
SILVIA: Yes, yes, I'm touring through Germany with my wife and two teenagers and a far-too-small rental car.
SIMON: (Laughter) Are you sharing your inventory, your research with your family?
SILVIA: Oh, they have heard more about it than they really should. When we were in the airport here, I managed to propitiously uncork a good one on my daughter as we're...
SIMON: Yeah. Yeah.
SILVIA: ...Approaching the escalator to get up to the ticket counter. I said, Helena (ph), if you're afraid of escalators, there are steps you can take.
SIMON: Oh.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMON: Paul Silvia's a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro - world expert on dad jokes. Listen, happy Father's Day to you.
SILVIA: Why, thank you. Happy Father's Day to you, as well, and to all the dads out there. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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