By Carlos Miranda Levy · July 22, 2026
Why bad dad jokes aren't a failed attempt at humor but its most honest form: the groan IS the prize. What the joke does for the bond, how it changes with the child's age, where the line falls between teasing and mocking, and the safety rule almost no one states — never mix the joke with authority.
Video transcript
There's a sound every bad-joke dad secretly chases: the groan. That drawn-out “daaad, come oooon,” eyes rolling, half a smile the kid can't quite swallow. The first time, you think you bombed. It takes years to understand the groan was the prize. The bad joke isn't humor gone wrong: it's a genre with its own rules, and the main one is that the happy victim is you. It's a deliberate lowering of the guard. You tell him, without saying it: with you I relax so much I let myself be ridiculous. That's why the groan isn't a failure, it's a receipt. A child who rolls his eyes at your joke is a child who feels safe enough to protest. The day he laughs for real, great; but the groan was already the win. And it does bonding work no serious talk can pull off: humor creates a private language. The jokes that only work in your house are bricks of belonging. A family with its own jokes has a border, and the child is inside it. It's also a defuser. A well-placed joke lowers the tension of a moment about to escalate and gives a frustrated child a dignified way out. The parent who knows how to get a laugh has a tool the one who only knows how to give orders doesn't. But the joke isn't the same all through childhood: from body humor to the apprentice comedian, from the tween's sovereign groan to the teen's undercover affection. Evolve the joke, or you're left telling the one for a child who no longer exists. All of this lives inside one line: you joke with the child, never at his expense. Not about his body, not about his identity, not to squeeze laughs from others while he shrinks. The best target available is you — the ridiculous dad. And the most important line: humor and authority never share a moment. When it's time to be serious, you're serious, no extra smile. That clean border is a gift — the child always knows which language you're speaking. The groan was never the failure: it was always the point.
There’s a sound every teller of bad jokes knows and secretly hunts for: the groan. That drawn-out «ugh, Dad», eyes rolling, half a smile the child can’t quite swallow. The first time you hear it, you think you failed. It takes years to understand that groan was the prize. You didn’t tell the joke to get a laugh. You told it for that: the moan, the eye-roll, the affectionate protest. The bad dad joke isn’t humor gone wrong. It’s a genre with its own rules, and the main one is that the happy victim is you.
This piece is about that. About why the dad joke isn’t funny — and that’s exactly why it works —, about what it does for the bond, about how it changes with the child’s age, and about the two lines you never cross: the one that separates teasing from mocking, and the one that separates the joke from authority. That last one is the important one, the one almost no one says out loud, and I’ve saved it for the end on purpose.
Before starting, a note from this house, because the name is misleading. We call it a «dad joke» because that’s what the genre is called across half the world — the bad joke, the pun dropped at the dinner table. But humor has no gender and no side. Mothers land terrible jokes, grandmothers have the worst puns in the family, and sometimes the aunt tells them worst of all. Here «dad» is a cultural form, not a division of roles. Everything that follows holds for any adult who wants to make a willing child laugh — or groan.
Let’s start with the paradox, because it explains everything else. A good joke goes for the laugh. The dad joke goes for the exact opposite: the affectionate rejection. It’s humor engineered to land badly on purpose, and inside that «landing badly» there’s an enormous tenderness worth unpacking.
When you tell a truly terrible joke, you’re telling your child several things at once without saying any of them. You’re telling them: I relax so much around you that I let myself be ridiculous. You’re telling them: I don’t need to impress you, I already have you. You’re telling them: this house is a safe place to be silly. The bad joke is a deliberate lowering of the guard. The father who puts the yogurt container on his head and asks «does this hat suit me?» isn’t trying to be funny; he’s being available. And children read availability long before they read wit.
That’s why the groan isn’t a failure: it’s a receipt. When your daughter moans «Dad, no», she’s telling you the message landed. That she recognizes the game, knows her part, and feels comfortable enough to protest. A child who rolls their eyes at your joke is a child who feels safe. If they genuinely laugh someday, great; but the groan was already the win.
It’s worth saying why this isn’t just decoration — and worth saying, with the same honesty, how much the research actually backs it up and how much it doesn’t, because it’s easy to sell you smoke here.
What exists is thin, and it’s honest to say so. A study of 762 Spanish boys and girls aged ten to fifteen found that those who perceive more humor in their parents report fewer internalizing problems — anxiety, sadness, withdrawal; no relationship showed up with outward-facing behavior problems, and it’s a cross-sectional, self-reported, single-country study (León-del-Barco et al., 2022). A survey of 312 adults found that people who report a good relationship with their parents are far more likely to recall their parents using humor while raising them (Emery et al., 2024) — which, being a memory, doesn’t tell us whether the humor improved the relationship or the good relationship makes people remember more laughter. And so it’s clear I’m not cherry-picking what suits me: the only longitudinal follow-up we found in infants pointed the opposite way from what intuition expects — infants who smiled less at six months showed more attachment security at twelve months, with the hypothesis that a baby who’s harder to amuse pulls their parents into engaging more —, and the sample was twenty-two (Mireault et al., 2012).
In other words: there are soft signals that humor accompanies good relationships, no proof that it causes them, and a healthy reminder that science isn’t here to confirm our pretty sentences. What follows I hold from experience, not from the lab.
What I can say without a number, because it’s visible in any kitchen, is this: humor builds a private language. The jokes that only work in your house — the pun no one has to finish anymore, the word that became funny for a reason only the two of you remember — are bricks of belonging. A family with its own jokes is a family with a border: there’s an inside, and the child is in it. That’s worth gold, especially in adolescence, when almost everything else pulls outward.
And there’s something else, more practical. Humor is a de-escalator. A well-timed bad joke lowers the tension of a moment that was about to boil over, turns a brewing tantrum into a laugh, gives a frustrated child a dignified way out. Not always — and not at just any moment, we’ll get to that —, but humor is one of the most underrated tools of calm parenting. The father who knows how to make people laugh has a resource the father who only knows how to give orders doesn’t.
Here’s the part almost no one thinks about: the dad joke is not the same across the child’s life, and the father who doesn’t update it ends up telling the joke of a child who no longer exists. Let’s go by age, because the same pun lands differently at each one.
A note before we start, so as not to sell as science what isn’t: there’s a classic framework of child humor development — Paul McGhee’s, built on Piaget’s cognitive stages — and it runs up to age twelve (Southam, 2005). The first two stops on this tour rest on it. The last two — the tween and the teen — are this house’s experience, not literature. They’re labeled as such.
The baby and the toddler: humor of the body. Before words, the joke is physical. The «where is it? … there it is!», the ridiculous voice, the face that appears and disappears, the balloon that escapes. The toddler doesn’t get wordplay — they get surprise, exaggeration, repetition. It’s pure delight, without irony. There’s no groan yet: there’s a clean, unguarded laugh, the kind that makes you feel like king of the world. Enjoy it; it doesn’t last.
This isn’t grandmothers’ folklore: it’s exactly what the framework describes. Around six months and up to roughly a year, what a baby laughs at is their attachment figure doing something strange — that is, you; and between one and four or five comes the stage of using objects wrong on purpose, which is when the child starts to produce humor themselves (Eskidemir Meral and Koçer, 2023). A detail I love: in that study, the scene used to measure this stage is a child putting a plastic container on their head and announcing they’re putting on their hat. The yogurt-container gag wasn’t my invention. It’s validated material.
The child: the comedian in training. Around six or seven, and up to ten or eleven, something magical happens: they start copying you. It’s the age of riddles and double-meaning jokes, when the child already understands a word can mean two things at once and falls in love with the pun with an intensity that’s equal parts adorable and exhausting (Eskidemir Meral and Koçer, 2023). Before that — around five — what cracks them up is something else: the absurd, the swapped name, the sound of words playing by themselves. If your clever pun falls flat at four, it’s not that they lack a sense of humor. It’s that it isn’t their turn yet. They’ll tell you the same joke fourteen times. They’ll invent jokes with no punchline and expect you to laugh anyway. They’ll come home from school with a joke they learned and tell it wrong, punchline first. That’s the best time to laugh even when it isn’t funny, because you’re not laughing at the joke: you’re laughing at the comedian who was just born. A child who dares to make people laugh is practicing something enormous — wit, timing, the risk of landing badly. Don’t kill the impulse by correcting the punchline. Laugh, and hand them one of yours.
The tween: the era of the sovereign eye-roll (from here on, this house’s experience: McGhee’s framework doesn’t reach this far). Between ten and twelve, the eye-roll arrives as an art form. Here your jokes start giving them «secondhand embarrassment», and that’s exactly their new purpose. The dad joke becomes a ritual of affectionate protest: they protest, you insist, and in that dance both of you know you love each other. Watch one temptation: don’t do it in front of their friends to genuinely embarrass them. In private, your bad joke is a hug shaped like a pun; in front of people who matter to them, it can turn into a small humiliation. The same joke changes sign depending on the audience. Learn to read the room.
The teen: clandestine affection. And here’s the surprise that makes enduring all those eye-rolls worth it: deep down, the teenager likes them. They won’t admit it. They’ll groan louder than ever. But the bad dad joke becomes, for the teen, a reassuring constant in a world that’s shifting under them entirely — proof that at home some things don’t change, that their father is still the same ridiculous guy he always was. Plenty of adults, remembering their father, remember his worst jokes with more tenderness than almost anything else. The teen groaning today is the adult who’ll repeat your bad joke in their own kitchen twenty years from now. Keep telling them. You’re recording something.
The rule that comes out of walking through the ages is a single one: let the joke evolve with the child. Body humor falls short by age eight; the innocent pun falls short by fourteen. An attentive father raises the level, adds irony once the child can handle it, plays with the current events the teen cares about, laughs at himself more and more. The joke that doesn’t grow with the child ages badly. The one that does, keeps them company.
Everything above lives inside a boundary that isn’t negotiable, and it’s worth spelling out in full: you joke with the child, never at the child’s expense.
The difference sounds subtle and is total. A good tease is a game between two people where both win; mockery uses the child as material for someone else’s laugh. One laughs with you; the other laughs at you. And children tell the difference with a precision we sometimes forget, because we ourselves felt it in our bodies as children.
The concrete lines, without dressing them up: you don’t make the child’s body the joke — not their weight, not their ears, not their acne, not anything they can’t change. You don’t make the child the joke in front of others to earn laughs at their expense. You don’t disguise as a «joke» a criticism you don’t dare say seriously — the «I was just kidding» that follows a low blow is one of the most damaging lies in parenting. And you don’t touch identity: what the child is isn’t comedy material. A good dad joke laughs at the situation, at a pun, at the world, at yourself — the ridiculous father is the best available target —, never at the child as an object of ridicule.
There’s a simple test to know which side you’re on: does the child laugh, or does the room laugh while the child shrinks? If your joke needs the child to look bad so others can look good, it’s not a joke. It’s punching down in disguise, and the disguise fools no one — least of all the child.
And on «I was just kidding», it’s worth getting serious for a moment, because here there’s a finding that stings. A study of 2,518 young adults recalling their childhood found that parental verbal aggression — teasing, put-downs, low blows — is associated with more anxiety and depression symptoms years later, and that it’s a probably underestimated factor. The devastating part is what else it found: high verbal affection did not buffer the effects of verbal aggression from the same parent (Polcari, Rabi, Bolger, and Teicher, 2014). These are retrospective self-reports and don’t prove causation, but the direction is clear and matches what anyone knows deep down: the affection that comes after does not cancel out the blow that came before. There’s no quota of hugs that makes up for the mockery. The only way out is never giving it.
And now to the most important one, the one that gives this piece’s serious half its title, the one I learned to respect precisely because it’s so easy to break without noticing: humor and authority don’t share a moment.
A child needs to know, with absolute certainty, when their father is speaking seriously. They need a clean boundary between «this is play» and «this is real», because things that aren’t a joke depend on that boundary: their safety, their obedience at the moment it matters, their trust that your word means what it says. The father who jokes while correcting, who laughs while setting a limit, who says serious things with half a smile «to soften them», is erasing that boundary. And a child who doesn’t know when you’re being serious is a child at risk — not metaphorically: really.
Picture it at the worst moment. The child is about to cross the street without looking. You shout «stop!». If your everyday «stop» comes wrapped in a joke half the time, how do they know this «stop» is one of the real ones? Authority works because it’s recognizable, and it’s recognizable because it’s consistent. Every time you dress up a limit as a joke, you dull the edge of the voice you’re someday going to need sharp.
Here I have to be honest about what exists and what doesn’t: no one has studied «joking while correcting». What has been studied is consistency. A study using daily diaries from Dutch parents — 134 mothers of two-and-a-half-year-olds and 149 families with children aged three to eight — separated two things we tend to confuse: varying the response within a single instance of misbehavior, and responding differently between one instance of misbehavior and the next. Only the second, consistency across episodes, showed up associated with the severity of the day’s disruptive behavior (Van den Akker, Leijten, Hoffenaar, and Gardner, 2024). It doesn’t prove my point; it’s the point’s structural premise, and it comes from a different door: what a child needs is to be able to predict which of your faces they’re going to get. A father who sometimes sets a limit seriously and sometimes turns it into a joke is, for all practical purposes, an inconsistent father.
There’s also a quieter harm. A child corrected amid laughter doesn’t know whether you’re scolding them or playing, and that ambiguity leaves them alone: they laugh just in case, or go quiet just in case, but they don’t learn what the correction was supposed to teach. Worse still is the joke that humiliates disguised as discipline — sarcasm as punishment, mockery as a «lesson». That isn’t humor and it isn’t authority: it’s both of them broken at once.
The practical rule is clean, and I’ll say it the way I’d say it to anyone who asks: when it’s time to be serious, be serious, without an extra smile. Humor is for the rest of the time — which is almost all of it. You can go back to joking ten minutes later, once the limit has landed and been understood; in fact it’s worth doing, because it teaches that correction doesn’t break the affection. But during the serious moment, the serious face. It isn’t rigidity: it’s a gift. You’re giving your child something they need more than another laugh — the certainty of always knowing which language you’re speaking to them in.
Go back to the groan from the beginning. It reads differently now. That «ugh, Dad» wasn’t rejection: it was a receipt. Every bad joke your child puts up with is a brick in a language only the two of you speak, daily proof that in their house an adult lets himself be ridiculous for their sake, a constant that will stay with them long after they walk out the door.
So tell the bad jokes. Tell them with gusto. Change them as the child grows — from the body to the pun, from the pun to irony —, laugh at yourself before anyone else, and keep the two lines you never cross: don’t make it material for mockery, and don’t mix the laughter with the moment for speaking seriously. Inside those two lines fits an entire lifetime of happy groans.
A good joke goes for the laugh. Dad’s goes for the eye-roll — and in that gesture, without saying it, it says: with you I let my guard down, with you I make a fool of myself, with you I stay. The groan was never the joke’s failure. It was always the point.
Carlos’s note
I confess the habit without shame: I’m one of those people who tell the bad joke and wait for the groan the way you’d wait for applause. And I stand behind what this piece says about the second line with more conviction than almost anything else here, because that’s where humor stops being decoration and becomes a matter of trust. In my house the joke lives in nearly every part of the day — but the serious moment announces itself, no smile to soften it, and I think that clean boundary is one of the best gifts you can give a child: always knowing which language you’re being spoken in. The other thing I’ll sign off on is changing the joke with age. It’s one more case of an idea I repeat until people are tired of hearing it: change it, but change it well. The joke that doesn’t grow with the child isn’t loyalty, it’s laziness.
Only sources that were retrieved and read are listed. Where only the abstract could be read, it’s noted.
Full audit, claim by claim, including claims deliberately not cited: resources/research/el-arte-del-chiste-de-papa.md.
This piece is peer commentary about parenting, not clinical guidance. If humor has become the usual vehicle for contempt in your house — yours or another adult’s — that’s no longer a matter of style, and it’s worth talking to someone who can truly listen.
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