Who finds dad jokes funniest? The answer might not astonish you

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No laughing matter

Feedback had a birthday within the past 12 months, and Feedback Jr gave us a card that read: “My ambition in life is to be as funny as you think you are.”

Still, we persist with our dad jokes, if only because our offspring’s exasperated reactions are so much fun. So we were delighted to learn that two psychologists, Paul Silvia and Meriel Burnett, have taken a scholarly interest in dad jokes. They have written an entire paper on the topic.

It’s called “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”. The abstract begins, if you hadn’t guessed, “A stick, of course.”

The authors collated more than 32,000 jokes from the r/dadjokes community on Reddit. This dataset is available alongside the paper, so Feedback naturally downloaded the whole thing. It includes such gems as “How can you find out how old a boat is? Look at its berth certificate.”

However, this isn’t just an excuse to trot out puns: this is serious research. The psychologists gathered data on how popular the jokes had been on the site, and showed some to volunteers. This allowed them to pose the key question: “who finds these quirky jokes funny?” For this, panel members were asked questions about their personalities, political views and so forth. It turns out that people who are what the paper calls “culturally conventional” – for instance, “more educated” or “more religious” – found the jokes funnier.

A key factor, identified as “the most intellectually profound question on the survey”, was whether people identified as cat people or dog people. Both groups found the jokes funnier, as did those who liked both animals, than those who didn’t like either type of pet. Which tracks. As the researchers say: “One does wonder what people who don’t like kittens and puppies happen to find funny.”

Finally, the researchers found that gender and parenthood affected people’s perception of the jokes. Or as they put it: “In these fraught and uncertain times, rife with mistrust of expertise and reason, it is perhaps reassuring to know that science has found that dads find dad jokes funnier.”

United in urination

Asleep at the wheel as ever, Feedback missed the publication in June of Jo-Anne Bichard and Gail Ramster’s book Designing Inclusive Public Toilets. Fortunately, reader Brian Reffin Smith is on the case.

The book’s argument is simple: public loos need to work for all, but they often don’t. “This book provides a critical overview of public toilet design in the UK and presents an urgent need to re-evaluate the accessibility of, and culture around, these essential spaces,” the publisher’s website explains.

Feedback is immediately on board. We have autistic relatives, for whom the high-pitched whine of some hand dryers is enough to cause a sensory overload, and who also have a lot to say about public toilets’ fluorescent lighting. Although we will note that the hardback has a recommended retail price of £70, which doesn’t seem very inclusive.

However, following Brian’s lead, we do want to flag the book’s subtitle. You might expect something dry and long-winded, like “How to design public conveniences to be accessible to everyone, regardless of gender, ethnicity, disability or neurodivergence”. But it is, in fact, “Wee the people”.

The end is kind of nigh

When you make a big claim and it gets some pushback, there are a few ways to respond. Maybe your critics made some good points, so you add some caveats or otherwise moderate your statements. Or maybe you decide you’ve been misunderstood, so you try to clarify your views.

This is not a story like that. Last month (18 October), Feedback reported the dispiriting news that humanity is on track to go extinct in the year 2339. This was based on a paper by demographers David Swanson and Jeff Tayman, who had noted a decline in fertility between 2019 and 2024, and gaily extrapolated 300-odd years into the future. This, Feedback suggested, might be somewhat unsupported.

To our surprise, Swanson got in touch. “Thanks,” he writes, “for acknowledging that our piece on human extinction was serious.” Which eliminates, once and for all, our lingering suspicion that the whole thing was a practical joke.

Swanson also sent us version 2 of the paper. It contains significant updates, perhaps because they have added in data from 2025. The extinction of the human species has consequently been postponed by almost a century: instead of 2339, we are now set to vanish in or around 2415. So that’s a relief.

However, the more significant change is encapsulated in the paper’s new title: “A regionally-based probabilistic forecast of human extinction“. You see, the researchers have now broken down their forecast by continent. “Asia will be the first region to experience extinction (2280), Europe, the second (2295), followed closely by the Americas (2300), then Africa (2360) and finally Oceania (2415),” they write. Buy that beachfront property on Easter Island, folks.

Feedback can’t help imagining a third version of the paper, which will forecast the precise Polynesian island where the very last human being will snuff it.

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