What Dad Jokes Taught Me About My Father
On confronting a generational gap, by Malvika Thirani, Intern from Home
On most evenings, I find myself sprawling on the couch, binge-watching stand up comedians on YouTube — sets that feature the usual millennial-beloved faces. As the laughter riot morphs into a downward spiral of recommended videos and soaring screen time, I notice the shadow towering over me.
“What are you watching?” asks my dad, leaning in from behind with the curiosity of a cat and eyes prying into my phone. Our unofficial in-house investigative journalist, my father loves listening to everything there is to say.
“Nothing,” I mutter sheepishly. He smiles and walks away.
Earlier during the day, he stopped me midway and asked, “Why did the Scarecrow win an award?” He drummed his fingers impatiently until ripping the punchline. “Because he was outstanding in his field!” His mighty laugh reached a crescendo and plopped into silence while my lips were a chapped flatline, wincing in disgust.
I had once shown him some of my favourite videos, but in the end he just deadpanned with beady eyes, “They are fine Malvika, but we had better comics in our time.”
Now, I do acknowledge the differences in ways we perceive humour. After all, he is used to watching Laughter Challenge and Comedy Circus on television — a distant memory when Siddhu’s guffaws wafted across every living room and the likes of Raju Srivastav deployed storytelling to tickle the funny bone.
Humour, we all know, has been the frontline crusader in uniting people during polarising times. While economic activity hit the skids during the Great Depression of the 1930s, radio comedy started scaling the peak of popularity. Even though the comfort it brought was short-lived, comedy in times of hardship had jolted many dampened spirits to life.
But I witness a contrasting phenomenon on a daily basis — humour, instead of bringing us closer, exposes the generational divide that stands between my father and I. Why will he relate to casual relationships when he hasn’t even seen the face of dating? Why will he laugh through the retorts on hook-up culture when he has only known the language of commitment? How do I simply bridge with humour, the gap between us that spans in years? There is only so much that gets lost in translation, and oftentimes, it is people — people like my father.
Despite the fact that he is hemmed in by his own contextual differences, he narrates his ‘Dad Jokes’ on the dining table with utmost aplomb and spunk. We have downed pints of knock-knock jokes and varied Haathi-Chiti scenarios (perhaps the Indian version of ‘two men walk into a bar’) during countless family reunions.
Whenever he receives a WhatsApp Forward that makes his heart swell with laughter, he immediately stops us in the midst of our work, lays down the premise of the joke and furtively staggers towards the quip — hoping that we too feel the same awe and amusement that he felt when he first read it.
There have been times when you saw the sunset and clicked a picture to share on Instagram, because you thought, people need to see this. There have been times when you heard a melody so good that you had to share it saying, ‘please give it a listen’ — similar to how my father keeps tagging me in Facebook jokes and funny riddles to solve, to induce in me the similar heartburn and abandon, the yearning and revelry that he felt the first time.
In keeping with his oral tradition, he made me see what really makes us human — our urgency to share and move people. The gulf of years between us hasn’t narrowed but I respect the way he shares what he shares with the purest of intentions, and when he does, I laugh now. You see, legend says that a ‘Dad Joke’ once walked into a bar. Do you know what happened next? Well, everyone laughed and escaped for a while.
