Firstly, how are we to make sense of the apparent popularity of dad jokes given that they are explicitly said to be “unfunny”? Millions of people seek them out and share them avidly with each other on websites like Twitter and Reddit. What gives? Are dad jokes funny, unfunny, or somehow both?

Secondly, what are we to make of the association between dads and dad jokes? One possible answer is that dad jokes are simply bad jokes and that dads have a bad sense of humor, but I argue against this interpretation in my new paper for this journal, “Dad Jokes and the Deep Roots of Fatherly Teasing.”

Dad jokes might seem like a strange topic for a journal called Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, but to understand the dad joke I argue that we have to look at the deep roots of each of its constituent concepts, dads and jokes. In this post, I will walk you through my central argument.

If the personal history behind a research article is sometimes useful to have, its value is less obvious for a review article. Reviewers, after all, should be objective, and even if this can never realistically be achieved, it still seems a little shameless to parade the deficiency. I do so here because I think that the different ways in which I have encountered 4E perspectives illustrate some tensions in the practice of 4E that are usually invisible in the academic literature. These tensions are important because they illustrate how the presentation of 4E as a radical intellectual program by humanities scholars (though not only them) can run ahead of the more prosaic reality of actual 4E research. Should my experiences not chime with those of others who have worked in 4E, I can only remind them that they have foresworn disembodied objectivity on a priori grounds, and thus have no claim against the reviewer who fails to exhibit it.