Abstract
What do people experience when they encounter jokes? Feelings of comic amusement—finding something funny—are the heart of effective humor, but emotional reactions to humor can be complex, as studies of sexual, disparaging, dark, and cringe humor have found. The present research explored a range of experiences to dad jokes, a joke genre marked by clean, affable content and comedic devices founded on wordplay, particularly puns and literalism. A sample of adults (n = 541) read 24 jokes from a large pool and rated each one on several dimensions (funny, interesting, irritating, boring, and confusing). Individual differences in these joke experiences formed two factors related to appeal and aversion, and stable lasso models found that people who found the jokes more appealing were distinguished by demographic features (having children and being more educated, religious, and subjectively affluent), humor self-concepts (identifying as a funny person and having a background in humor), and personality traits (being higher in agreeableness and lower in openness to experience). No stable predictors were found for joke aversiveness. The findings support the 3-WD model of humor, which proposes funniness and aversiveness as general dimensions of humor experience, and illustrate the value of studying specific joke genres instead of an abstract category of verbal humor.