In honor of Father’s Day, here’s a health quiz:
• If asked whether you just got a haircut, have you ever said, “No, I got them all cut.”
• If your son said, “I’m hungry!” Would you reply, “Hello, Hungry – I’m Dad.”
• If your daughter asked you to make her a milkshake, would you tell her, “Poof! You’re a milkshake.”
If you answered yes to any of those, you’ve committed a dad joke.
That’s not to be confused with a bad joke – although by definition, yeah, they probably are. And you don’t have to be a dad to tell one. But for those of us with a certain type of dad, the threat level may be as high as a unique squirrel in a tree. (Know how to catch a unique squirrel? Unique up on it.)
But here’s a surprise: This least-surprising form of comedy might be good for you and those around you.
The term “dad joke” is relatively new. The concept is not, said Anne Libera, director of comedy studies at The Second City in Chicago. They used to be simply called “jokes.”
Libera teaches about dad jokes. Seriously. As in, she’s also an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago and has written about the science of comedy for the AMA Journal of Ethics. “They are the thinnest form of comedy,” often based in puns and, unless you are a 5-year-old, nothing you haven’t heard before.
Now, nobody has done in-depth research on the cardiovascular benefits of dad jokes. If they have, they are not admitting it. But if you accept that dad jokes could, in theory, provide humor and might, possibly, produce a laugh, experts say the benefits could be small but real.
Laughter, for example, has been associated with boosting short-term memory, creativity and immunity, said Dr. Gurinder Bains, associate professor of allied health studies at Loma Linda University in California.
Bains, also a former director of research for the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor, said laughter has many mechanisms for boosting health. “For example, laughter reduces the stress hormone cortisol,” which has been associated with a risk of cardiovascular problems such as high blood pressure. It also might help with sleep by promoting the release of melatonin.
Laughter also allows a rush of mood-boosting, pain-alleviating endorphins, said Dr. Beth Frates, director of lifestyle medicine and wellness in the department of surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Frates was co-author of a 2016 review of research on laughter, published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, that was conceived during a laughing fit with her co-authors during a campus stroll at Harvard.
She can’t recall what made them laugh. (“It was not a dad joke,” she said.) But the review distinguishes humor from laughter. To wit (ha!): Humor is a stimulus; laughter is the response. Something can be humorous without provoking laughter.
