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

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Nothing to laugh about

Feedback celebrated its birthday over the last 12 months and Feedback Jr gave us a card that said: “My ambition in life is to be as funny as you think I am.” »

Yet we persist with our father’s jokes, if only because our children’s exasperated reactions are so amusing. So we were delighted to learn that two psychologists, Paul Silvia and Meriel Burnett, were interested in dad jokes. They wrote an entire article on the subject.

It’s called “What’s Brown and Sticky? Delve into the inescapable comic mystery of dad humor with a handful of machine learning models, hundreds of humans, and tens of thousands of dad jokes.” The summary begins, if you hadn’t guessed, with “A stick, of course.”

The authors collected more than 32,000 jokes from the r/dadjokes community on Reddit. This dataset is available with the paper, so Feedback naturally uploaded the whole thing. It includes gems such as “How do you know the age of a boat? Look at its mooring certificate”.

However, this is not just an excuse to make puns: this is serious research. Psychologists gathered data on the popularity of jokes on the site and showed some of them to volunteers. This allowed them to ask the key question: “Who finds these offbeat jokes funny?” » For this, the members of the panel were questioned about their personality, their political opinions, etc. It turns out that people the paper calls “culturally conventional” — for example, “more educated” or “more religious” — found the jokes funnier.

A key factor, identified as “the most intellectually profound question in the survey”, was whether people identified as cats or dogs. Both groups found the jokes funnier, as did those who liked both animals, than those who liked neither type of animal. What tracks. As the researchers say: “One really wonders what people who don’t like kittens and puppies find funny. »

Finally, the researchers found that gender and parenting affected joke perception. Or as they put it: “In these difficult and uncertain times, marked by distrust of expertise and reason, it is perhaps reassuring to know that science has discovered that dads find dad jokes funnier.” »

United in urination

Still asleep at the wheel, Feedback missed the June publication of the book by Jo-Anne Bichard and Gail Ramster Designing inclusive public toilets. Luckily, reader Brian Reffin Smith is on the case.

The book’s argument is simple: public toilets should work for everyone, but this is often not the case. “This book provides a critical overview of the design of public toilets in the UK and presents an urgent need to re-evaluate the accessibility and culture around these essential spaces,” explains the publisher’s website.

Comments are immediately taken into account. We have autistic relatives, for whom the high-pitched whine of some hand dryers is enough to cause sensory overload, and who also have a lot to say about fluorescent lighting in public restrooms. It should be noted, however, that the hardback book has a recommended retail price of £70, which doesn’t seem very inclusive.

However, like Brian, we want to point out the subtitle of the book. You might expect something dry and long, like “How to design public facilities to be accessible to everyone, regardless of gender, ethnicity, disability or neurodivergence.” But it’s actually about “Wee the people”.

The end is almost near

When you make an important complaint and it receives negative reactions, there are several ways to respond. Maybe your reviews have made some good points, so you add some caveats or tone down your statements. Or maybe you decide you’ve been misunderstood, so you try to clarify your point of view.

It’s not a story like that. Last month (October 18), Feedback reported the sad news that humanity is on the verge of extinction in 2339. This information builds on a paper by demographers David Swanson and Jeff Tayman, who noted a decline in fertility between 2019 and 2024, and happily extrapolated some 300 years into the future. This, suggested by Feedback, might be somewhat unsupported.

To our surprise, Swanson contacted us. “Thank you,” he wrote, “for recognizing that our article on human extinction was serious. Which eliminates, once and for all, our lingering suspicions that it was all a prank.

Swanson also sent us version 2 of the document. It contains significant updates, perhaps because they added data from 2025. The extinction of the human species has therefore been delayed by almost a century: instead of 2339, we are now expected to disappear around 2415. So that is a relief.

However, the most significant change is summarized in the paper’s new title: “A regional probabilistic forecast of human extinction.” You see, the researchers have now broken down their predictions 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.

Returnees can’t help but imagine a third version of the document, which would predict the precise Polynesian island where the very last human being will extinguish it.

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