I love dad jokes — the kind of joke that essentially relies on double meanings and language play. When I am with my young niece and nephew, I make them up pretty much all the time.
Today the two of them were visiting our lab, and on the way out my nephew noted how much fun it is to punch things in VR. So I made up a dad joke.
I said “Do you know why punching something in VR is so popular?”
“No, why?” they both asked.
“Because,” I explained, “it’s always a hit.”
Which is a perfectly appropriate joke to tell a nine year old and a thirteen year old. But then I noticed that I do the same thing with my grad students.
For example, this evening we were discussing physics simulations in VR. At one point I said “it’s ok to study differential calculus before learning about coefficients of friction, but you need to be careful.”
“Why?” they asked.
“Because,” I explained, “it’s a slippery slope.”
This was clearly a dad joke, but one that you might need to be a grad student to fully appreciate. Which suggests that there may be particular flavors of dad jokes that aren’t meant for little kids at all.
Perhaps there are dad jokes that only work if you tell them to, say, a personal injury lawyer, or a paleontologist, or a neurosurgeon. The jokes are still complete groaners, but in order to groan you need some advanced knowledge.
Maybe these should be called “learned dad jokes”.