A Tribute To The Dad Joke, One Of The Great Traditions Of Fatherhood

Ian Brodie, Cape Breton University and Moira Marsh, Indiana University

“Dad, I’m hungry.”

“Hi, hungry. I’m Dad.”

If you haven’t been asleep for the past 20 years, you’ll probably recognize this exchange as a dad joke.

The term dad joke is credited to a June 20, 1987, editorial in the Gettysburg Times. Writer Jim Kalbaugh praised fathers’ telling of groan-inducing jokes to their children – or, importantly, to others in front of their children.

The practice, Kalbaugh wrote, was “one of the great traditions of fatherhood worth preserving.”

The term stayed remarkably dormant until the internet age: The first entry in Urban Dictionary was in 2004 by a contributor named Bunny; it debuted on Twitter in 2007; joke compilation books were published under the theme starting in 2013 in the U.K. and 2016 in the U.S.; and the Oxford English Dictionary added it to its entry for “dad” in 2014.

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