Personal Blogs

A million thanks to New Scientist magazine (Feedback 22 October 2025) for alerting me to the (serious, I promise) scientific paper by Paul Silvia and Meriel Burnett entitled,

What’s brown and sticky? Peering into the ineluctable comedic mystery of dad humor with a handful of machine learning models, hundreds of humans, and tens of thousands of dad jokes *

As well as the paper, the website hosts a downloadable list of, as promised, 32,000 jokes. The download is Joke Database.zip, just over 50 MB. When expanded it holds two datasets, one with the full 32k jokes (all gathered from Reddit) and the other a subset of 501 jokes the researchers put to a panel of human joke evaluators.

I was able to open the big dataset in Excel ^¶ and sure enough it is a treasure house of (slightly over) 32k (mostly) family-friendly dad jokes. Just imagine, a dad joke a day for almost 90 years.

The database contains a lot of data beyond the actual jokes and would be fertile ground for further research or so I imagine. But for now I thought I would come up with a program to print random dad jokes on request.^§ Here's a sample run, as you'll see the jokes are of variable quality.

See a random joke? y/n y
A burglar broke into our house last night and stole all of the light bulbs I should be upset, but I'm delighted.
See a random joke? y/n y
I was really mad when they locked me in a room with nothing but the remnants of a dead chicken, but I got out. Good thing I had a bone to pick.
See a random joke? y/n y
What do you call someone who does not like physics A physicist .
See a random joke? y/n y
My Llama roommate yelled at me, "I've had enough of your dad jokes! Leave now!" "Fine," I replied, "Alpaca my bags and leave."
See a random joke? y/n y
Why are almost all (capital) Greek letters old? Because there is only one Greek letter that is new (N/v). &#;
See a random joke? y/n y
The cashier at the grocery store asked "paper or plastic?" I said "paper" thinking she meant "cash or charge." She started bagging my stuff in a paper bag so I yelled: "No! Plastic." Then she screamed at me: "Hey! we don't...take...Credit Cards."
See a random joke? y/n y
what do the eiffel tower and a tick have in common? they are both "parisites" lol
See a random joke? y/n n

*  Published on OSF Oct 29, 2025, 12:27 PM.

¶  Be warned, the spreadsheet has a lot of columns.

§  Python code below:

import csv, random

jokes = []

with open("Reddit_Dad_Jokes_OSF.csv", mode='r', encoding='utf-8') as file:
    reader = csv.reader(file)
    for row in reader:
        jokes.append(row[1])

quit = False
while not quit:
    resp = input("See a random joke? y/n ")
    if resp == "y":
        print(random.choice(jokes))
        print()
    else:
        quit = True