How to Write A Dad Joke

1. Introduction: I hurt my spine. There's no turning back now. Don't underestimate the power of a good yet terrible dead joke. My name's Michael leukemias and welcome to how to write dad jokes. I'm an entrepreneurial writer and amateur stand-up comedian. And I've just naturally been drawn to dad jokes, uh, four years, written hundreds of them, even submitted a dad jokes to laugh, he taffy, sure, you've read some dead jokes on their rappers. In this course. Simply put, we're going to help you write your own dad jokes. We're going to explain what they are, their structure, and go through an exercise where you'll create anywhere from one to six dad jokes that you can share with your friends, family, and maybe it with your children. You're probably get some laughs and probably some more groans. But join me for a really fun course that I'm really excited to teach. 2. What is a Dad Joke: Thank you so much for joining me for how to write dad jokes. I hope you're excited to write your own dead jokes because I sure as heck am as well. Let's go ahead and get started and we'll start with what is it, angio. So what is a dad joke? I asked one of my comedian buddies, Dr. pool, name is Matt Miller. He goes by Doctor Poole. He says dad jokes are less about being funny and more about being clever. I think there definitely is a balance there. Some people find dead jokes extremely hilarious. I do. The majority of people probably find them a little bit more annoying. So let's look at what they are. So dead jokes are funny and I roll worthy at the same time, they usually an equal blend of both their silly and some people would call them corny. And there's simple. It's a setup and a punchline and we'll get into that. The specifics of that a little bit later. They usually consist of wordplay. It's not a shocking joke that you tell in a long stand-up routine. Like if you were to watch Dave Chappelle or Chris Rock or any of the greats. They have a C, don't do dead jokes. It's much different than that. And dad jokes are also innocent. So let's look at what dead jokes aren't. 3. What A Dad Joke Isnt: So what aren't dad jokes? Dead jokes are called dead jokes because they can be told by a dad to children or friends or grandparents, pretty much anyone, they have a really wide audience. It's supposed to have mass appeal. Insert bad banana joke. So dead jokes aren't offensive. So if you're creating a dad joke, stay away from anything dealing with race, sex, religion, politics. Try to stay as far away from any of those subjects. Because then you're just going to be controversial. Those jokes are fine for, for other purposes, but the motto, dad jokes, they're also not vulgar. And so you don't want to talk about anatomy. And you also don't want to use swear words, even a word like hell, I would keep out of dead jokes. Long. The shorter, the better for a dead joke. They should be. Setup is a short sentence and the punchline is either one or two words or short sentence. They're very short jokes, which makes it simple but challenging. And obviously sexual. Don't make it, don't make it that joke. Sexual. That's not what they are. 4. Classic Dad Joke Examples: Let's look at some examples. We'll start with some dad joke classics. What do you call cheese that isn't yours? Nacho cheese. That one obviously place on words because nacho cheese sounds like not your fees. And there are many dead jokes. Follow that formula. This is one of my favorites. I went looking for camouflage at the store. Couldn't find any. Obviously because camouflage supposed to make you hard to find or make something hard to find. Why couldn't the vice school stand up? It was too tired. What do you call a fake noodle and then pasta. Another good wordplay joke. How do you make a Kleenex dance? Yep, put a little bogey in it. Now we're going to move on to some of the dead jokes that I've created. 5. My Dad Joke Examples: So here are some dad jokes that I'm proud of that I have written over the past year, what insect has the most fat of butterfly? Where do bodybuilders go to eat? Above fe? Why did the alphabet keep going to the bathroom? It has five vowels. That's pretty I roll one obviously exchanging the V and vowels for a, b, changing it to vowels. What's the best job a tool can get? Vice President? That one's almost border and being political, but it's talking about a tool. Why did the moon breakup with the Earth? It just needed space. I started writing critiques of parties. My first was a rave review. Did you hear about the band that performed a concert in the middle of the highway? It was a traffic jam. 6. Project: It is almost project time. In the next video, we're going to go through the worksheet. So you can go ahead and go to the project section of this course and download that worksheet. That's what we'll be going through. I'm going to explain it in the next video. And then you're gonna go through it on your own just because it will take some time to think of those dad jokes. But I'm going to walk you through the process. As I mentioned, dad joke is set up and punchline. It's pretty simple and we'll go over that. For example, set up. Why couldn't the bicycle stand on its own? The punchline is it was too tired. I wouldn't go any further with a joke than that. There are things in jokes where you can add tags, where it's like additional punchlines to get more laughs. It's not really necessary for dead jokes. So let's go on to the worksheet. 7. Worksheet: It is time to get to work. Here is the how to write a dad worksheet. We're just going to quickly go through on the video and then I want you to take some time going through the worksheet to create your dad jokes. But I want to give you the highlights here and explain a couple of things that might be missing. So the basic components of a dad joke are the setup and punchline. Example. The setup, why couldn't the bicycle stand on its own punchline? It was too tired, get it too tired. I still love that joke. Forgive me. So the funny thing is here, you often want to start with the punchline when you creating these jokes, you might think of tires and then getting tired and then too tired, and then come up with a setup that's usually the way I go about creating the dad jokes. And that's what we're gonna do on this worksheet. So dead jokes really are all about wordplay. There almost always a play on words. They aren't lengthy anecdotes. And there are lots of different types of wordplay which you can dive more into, but we're going to keep it pretty simple. So dad jokes that are wordplay here that are mainly puns. One is what bug has the most cholesterol of butter? Fly. A really bad day, Egypt that I came up with another bad dad joke. I came up with, where do bodybuilders go to eat above, say, yikes, right? There are also many other forms of wordplay that work for dead jokes. This is what I use all the time when my kids will say, Hey Dad, I'm hungry and I go, Hey, hungry, I'm dad. They hate it, but that's a classic dad job example. So as I mentioned, dead jokes can really come from about anything. There was one time I was walking on a nearby trail, heard of woodpecker. I thought, oh my goodness, woodpecker. What a funny phrase. And the words can also mean something else. Obviously wood and Packer. Probably not appropriate for a dad joke, but I thought of the word woodpecker first and then I thought of the setup before rubber prosthetics. What did they use for penile replacements? Would packers makes me crack up more than other people. That's another good sign of a dad joke. So during another recent walk, I thought of the phrase, I need space. Space can obviously refer to the distance between you and somebody else and outerspace. I began thinking of both relationships and planets and came up with, why did the moon breakup with earth? It needed space. The joke works because it can be interpreted in two ways, as the moon meeting space from the earth after a tough breakup. And also the moon literally needing space, which it exists in. So now we're going to jump into actually creating dad jokes. Now, I've already populated this form with some words. Some words that I thought of that would be pretty easy to create dad joke from. You can create them from your own as well. But for this exercise, I wanted to try to make it easier on you. So I have 20 different words here, as you can see in this chart, from back to blast. Then a couple of words that sound the same, which are also fantastic for dead jokes like night and night, way and way, feet and feet, hair and hair. A lot of dad jokes play right in that realm. So what you're gonna do is you're going to pick three words here. And you're going to pick them as your punchlines. They don't have to just be your punchline like my wood pecker joke. They could be part of the punchline as well, which I give example of below. So pick three words that you want to start working from and put them right here. You can write within this document or create a new document to write your three punchlines. Then starting with punchline one, really think about that and create a setup that would make sense to then transition into the punchline. So example, this setup, why did the dresser feel naked? Punchline? It didn't have any drawers. And drawers is one of the words I put up there. So go through and create three setups and three punchlines which will give you three different dad jokes. After that, you want to trim any words that can be removed from the jokes without losing the meaning. And this is called word economy. You want your joke as short as possible while still keeping its meaning. Trust me, the shorter the joke is, the funnier it is, the more you have to explain something, the less funny it is. And so if this was easy for you, think of a word that's not on the list and do the same thing, use that as a punchline, then create the setup. Now I also created a bonus exercise, playing around with phrases. So I also came up with nine different common phrases that would lend themselves pretty well to Jed dead jokes. And these are all common American phrases. So the one I created from this is really bad. Sorry. The setup is my uncle Joseph was liquefied on the job. He was turned into a cup of Joe. A cup of Joe was one of the phrases. So I thought of that first and then obviously uncle Joseph, job in short for Joseph. So that's it. You're gonna go through create those. And then after you're done with these, share them, Chairman, the project section of the course. So take time, go ahead and pause the course here, go through this worksheet. I really look forward to your dad jokes and then we will finish up with a few tips and then a quick summary and note. Thanks. 8. Final Tips: All right guys. Hopefully you have your dad jokes completed and maybe you've already shared them or maybe you're getting ready to share them. Let's cover some final dad joke tips here. So you wanna make it funny and understandable for even a six-year-old? You don't want to repeat the same word in the setup and punchline, you want to use a synonym. So there's one joke or really bad dad joke that I have about a wheel service technician and him not changing a wheel for 24 hours. And then the punchline is, I guess you could say he didn't tire at all. But if you use tire than tyre, again, you're blowing the punchline. So that's why you want to make sure if you're mentioning what the punchline is going to be in the first part of the joke in the setup. You want to make sure it uses them in them use a different word referring to that. You don't want to use. One of the same words in the setup that you use in the punchline and practice word economy. As I said, the shorter the joke, the more impactful, the better it is. Seriously, take every word possible out of the joke without changing its meaning. This is something I learned, just doing marketing copy for businesses that really helped with joke writing. Just practicing word economy, really making them as short and concise as possible. It's really important in jokes, especially a really short joke. Here's another tip I got from Jason gesture, fellow comedian here in the Illinois area. He says Keep it obvious. Watch some Steven, right? Or Mitch had Berg. They'll put you in the right mindset and that's really good advice. Go to YouTube. Yeah, watch some Mitch hamburgers. Stephen write jokes. They are champions of dad jokes. They write much better ones than I'll ever be able to create. But they're definitely inspirations of mine and, and yeah, go, go watch some of those if you're really struggling with a writing dad jokes, or if you just want some more firepower, if you want some more ideas. So don't forget to share your jokes in the project section of this course. Now let's sum it all up and conclude this bad boy. 9. Summary: And that concludes how to write dad jokes. I hope you've had as much fun taking this course as I've had teaching it. Make sure to share your jokes, get them out there, sharing with your family and friends. And of course your kids see their reactions and hopefully you'll have as much fun telling these jokes as you did creating them. And you'll be inspired to write more. You know, go for long walks, do some free writing, figure out some ways to come up with some new ideas. Go through a dictionary just looking for random words to then write and bore the edge jokes. It's a lot of fun to do and who knows what will lead to. Maybe you can try standup comedy, which I would definitely recommend just as a life experience. And once again, I have been Michael Lu keys, make sure rate this course. Share your jokes and the project section. And if you're interested in writing for small businesses, took out some of my other courses as well. Thanks guys.