The Origin of the Dad Joke

Post date: February 24, 2025

By Peter Wolfe

While the modern-day dad joke is a relatively new concept as a whole, its pun-heavy nature has made it a primary source of humor that has existed for centuries. Some of the earliest recorded "dad jokes" date back nearly 2000 years. The earliest account stems back to the Odyssey of Homer, in which he swiftly tricks the cyclops, using the monomer "nobody" to swindle his way out of the cyclops's cave while the cyclops claims, "Nobody" hurt him. Court jesters of the Middle Ages, on the other hand, took to jokes about farm animals, begging the question to their king, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" By the 19th century, joke books were composed primarily of wordplay and homonyms (transposing words that sound alike). And yet, the term "dad joke: would not be coined until the late 1980s when, with the rise of TV comedians, the dad joke would finally be named due to the predictable nature of the gags told in a fatherly fashion. In 1987, dad jokes were officially defined by the Oxford Dictionary as "a joke told by a father… which is embarrassing or unoriginal,” but no matter how unoriginal or embarrassing they may be, dad jokes remain a great bonding mechanism and a great way to make people laugh.