End the Dad Slander

By Christian Schneider

Sunday, June 21, 2026

 

At lunch a few years back, a friend of mine mentioned that another mutual friend of ours had recently begun dating a woman who worked at a delicatessen.

 

“At least he’ll never be prov-alone,” I said.

 

I rose from the table, expecting a standing ovation from the diners at nearby tables. I had, after all, cracked the code and told the greatest joke of all time. I immediately thought of the famous Monty Python sketch about the joke that was so good, it immediately killed anyone who heard it. I figured maybe I should check whether the people around us were still breathing.

 

But then my friend uttered the most poisonous words I could hear.

 

“Nice dad joke.”

 

No comedy historian has yet defined exactly what a “dad” joke is. The typical understanding is that it is a simplistic attempt at humor, often the most obvious joke that can be made in any situation. One doesn’t have to have sired children to tell dad jokes — a woman in her 20s, for instance, can rip off a groaner just as easily. But if you are a man of a certain age, any levity provided by a one-liner will automatically be slandered with the “dad joke” calumny.

 

And it doesn’t stop there. In modern American culture, the “dad” label has become a catch-all dismissal, a scarlet letter of cultural irrelevance applied before the subject can even mount a defense. The Wall Street Journal recently declared that “dad books” — meaning books aimed at men who prefer narrative history, biography, and military nonfiction over whatever Elena Ferrante acolytes are assigning each other — are a dying breed. Watch any of Taylor Sheridan’s shows, like Yellowstone, Tulsa King, or Land Man? Congratulations, you are watching “dad TV.” Do you enjoy Wilco, Pearl Jam, or Van Halen? You are apparently marooned in the nostalgic backwaters of “dad rock.”

 

(A recent article included Metallica in a list of “dad rock” bands, so congrats — your goofy, simple-minded dad might enjoy songs about people being burned alive. There is more going on in his brain than you might expect.)

 

Everything labeled “dad” is devalued, as if fatherhood itself removes one from the world of complex concepts and behaviors. The common perception is that dads are generally embarrassing, out of touch, and resistant to change. They think less deeply, letting the simplicity of a movie wash over them without interrogating its gender politics. They’ve been through the wringer and don’t need anything too challenging. They are, in short, dismissed.

 

But here’s the thing about dismissal: it usually says more about the dismisser than the dismissed.

 

Consider what the “dad” label actually describes. A man who reads books about D-Day or the fall of Rome isn’t intellectually incurious — he’s interested in the actual organizing events of human civilization. A man who watches Yellowstone isn’t intellectually deficient; he’s drawn to a show about land, loyalty, family, consequence, and the collision between tradition and modernity. These are not trivial themes. Meanwhile, the people rolling their eyes at “dad culture” are typically those who consider prestige television about unlikable rich people having affairs to be sophisticated viewing.

 

Further, think of all the dads who continued to achieve after becoming parents. Abraham Lincoln had his first son, Robert, in 1843, when he was still a struggling Illinois lawyer with a thin political résumé. The presidency, the Civil War leadership, and the Emancipation Proclamation all came after he was already a father several times over. Mark Twain penned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and many other great works after raising children. Winston Churchill managed to sneak both parenthood and saving the world into his work-life balance.

 

And sure, maybe dads take fewer risks and tame their weirder impulses once they have mouths to aid in feeding. In college, I used to get drunk and, as an inebriated public service, wash all the cars on my street at three in the morning. When you’re 22, such an act earns you the goodwill of your neighbors. When you’re 50, it should earn you a restraining order.

 

The cultural dismissal of dads also conveniently ignores the sheer weight of accumulated knowledge that fatherhood tends to produce. A dad who fixes the furnace, negotiates a mortgage, coaches youth soccer, files his own taxes, and still manages to grill a respectable flank steak has developed a broader applied intelligence than is usually credited. He’s not failing to engage with the world. He’s engaged with the actual world, rather than the performed version of it.

 

What you often see from dads is simply traditional masculinity doing its quiet work. They aren’t flashy. They don’t need to attract attention to themselves, don’t require external validation for every minor decision, and generally resist the therapeutic impulse to narrate their inner states at length for an appreciative audience. They want to do their jobs, raise their children, and, yes, watch a documentary about Stalingrad.

 

That turns out to be a fairly coherent set of values. The books and documentaries about Hitler, after all, are not escapism — they are an attempt to understand one of the most catastrophic and morally complex events in human history, filtered through the experience of men who endured unimaginable conditions with varying degrees of dignity. That a middle-aged man sitting in a recliner finds this compelling does not mark him as culturally stunted. It marks him as a person interested in the stakes of human existence.

 

The “dad” insult, at its core, is condescension dressed up as critique. It assumes that the cultural preferences of men who’ve embraced fatherhood as they leave their own youth behind are self-evidently inferior to whatever the current arbiters of taste have decided is worthwhile, and that the men who hold those preferences are too dull to know what they’re missing. In other words, it’s a kind of snobbery.

 

Dads, for their part, are largely unbothered. And that’s what makes them great.