Ep 216 - You’re Not Funny (The Data Science of Dad Jokes)

Can you statistically prove why your dad jokes are terrible? A team of researchers scraped over 32,000 jokes from Reddit to find out. In this #StudyFinds episode of #ProveItPod, Dr. Matt Law breaks down the anatomy of a dad joke, exploring the semantic distance and linguistic markers that make them succeed or bomb. We also do a critical peer-review of this unpublished preprint, looking at the limitations of Reddit data, the problem with hypercube subsampling, and the hazards of letting the media run with pre-registered findings. Finally, we pull out some practical takeaways for OSH professionals on how to use concreteness to make your safety training actually stick.

References:

Chesterton, G. (2026, May 19). Even science can’t make my dad jokes funny. The Telegraph.

Silvia, P. J., & Burnett, M. I. (2025). 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mystery of dad humor with a handful of machine learning models, hundreds of humans, and tens of thousands of dad jokes [Unpublished preprint]. Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ex2q7_v1