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Matt Wrather and Pete Fenzel embrace their changing lives and discuss the groaners that have come to define one of the most common and commonly lampooned interpersonal relationships: the dad joke. We trace the special characteristics in the relationships between parents and children that confound and distort humor. We follow the forms of parental jokes as, transposed, they go on to distort relationships between adults. We frame several theories of dad joke phenomenology, relying on several different definitions of the term, chief among them the Dad joke that gives, inviting the listener to be smart; the Dad joke that takes, asserting a mocking superiority; the Dad joke from affability, projecting nonthreatening helpfulness, and the Dad joke from isolation, calling up animals, foods, and everyday objects as subjects to replace a lack of shared experience and perspective. Kindness and yearning and cruelty, hope and fear and Donald Duck: all are Dad, and all are Joke. Plus, learn the newest form of dad joke, and be ready to spring it on your coworkers, like a slinky during a fire drill. Call us oldheads, call us Overthinkers, just don’t call us collect, because like a broken iPad, we don’t accept the charge.

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Episode 873: No-Eye Deer originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]