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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I said “Do you know why punching something in VR is so popular?”<\/p>\n
“No, why?” they both asked.<\/p>\n
“Because,” I explained, “it’s always a hit.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
“Why?” they asked.<\/p>\n
“Because,” I explained, “it’s a slippery slope.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Maybe these should be called “learned dad jokes”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading “Learned dad jokes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21911"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21911"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21913,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21911\/revisions\/21913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}