I have recently received some feedback about including sexuality as a topic for dad jokes. Although it was not the most constructive of feedback, some points were made. Sex as a topic is not the same as sexuality, and I apologize for not making that distinction clearer. I was basing my moderating on what was being reported and sex being a topic as understood for children closer to puberty, although sexuality such as LGBTQ+ parents/partners/people can be understood much earlier. While I stand by still keeping actual sexual themes (anatomy, sex positions, etc.) as an off-limits topic for the community, sexuality seems reasonable to include.
This community is not static; I want to do my best to maintain a place that can grow with the community while staying true as a place for humor in a world that has plenty of unpleasant things. I am not a bot, and am indeed a person that is open to having respectful discussions.
Tell me what you think should and should not be included as “off limits topics.” Should profanity be allowed, or possibly only certain words? Are there other suggestions you have? I will try to look at the common themes from any feedback and apply them over the next two weeks or so.
Edit:
To further clarify this post, gayness and the like have never been and will continue not being against community rules. The post in question was removed in error because I am a sleep deprived human and made a mistake about removing a post about sexuality instead of sex. I am apologizing, had already restored the post, and am attempting to make it right.
I originally intended this community to be a place for jokes that can be told to a person of any age, since essentially every other humor source was already geared toward adults. I thought a safe age to draw that line would be five years old. This is where the “clean” and not “adult themes” considerations were made for not including jokes that featured drugs, swearing, and sex. Parenting is a very personal endeavor, and families may choose to talk about sex at age five. Parenting choices and styles are not the purpose of this discussion, and I can understand the visceral reactions people may be feeling, and I’d like to keep this discussion about what to improve about the dadjokes community.
Early in the formation of this community I asked the same question and got all feedback to keep it “all ages friendly.” I’m now seeing some people want to keep it “all ages friendly” and many that want to lift the limitations and simply keep the spirit of the dad jokes. As many of you point out, dad jokes are not limited to younger children or even being dads for that matter.
So far, it looks like the simplest answer would be to do away with c/unclejokes and remove limitations in c/dadjokes about topics for jokes. Is there a compromise for people that want to keep it “all ages friendly,” such as using the NSFW tag for certain posts? Or vice versa, have a tag for “kid friendly” or “safe for all ages”? Or leave it as a “free for all” and let people sift through as they choose? If the majority wants the “free for all,” I suppose there could be a separate community specifically for “jokes for all ages.”
As a reminder, please be respectful of each other. Aggressive comments will be removed.
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If we can’t mention gay marriage, then we must also not speak of straight marriage. If we can’t mention same sex relationships, then we must also forbid references to other relationships as well.
Are we really worried that five-year-olds are lurking here? Anyone who makes it this far is old enough to handle mentions of gay/straight/bi/poly relationships. Let’s just be pragmatic and draw the line at truly graphic references like any other joke community might.
I would say that it is fine to moderate for hypothetical five-year-olds, but I think any form of thinking towards anyone needing protectiong from anything but straigh monogamous relations is realy bad.
I just want to throw out as the child of a lesbian couple that I disagree that talking about gay marriage is something that needs to wait until puberty. It certainly didn’t take that long for the other kids at school to notice I had two moms.
There are even kids books for explaining it, when I was a kid I had Daddy’s Roommate and Heather Has Two Mommies just as a for instance.
If gayness is against the rules, straightness needs to be too. Just shut the whole thing down.
But it’s not. And it wasn’t. Where do you get this stuff?
It’s a joke, my guy. You’re in the Dad Jokes sub…
Tell one dad joke on straightness ? Weird it seem they doesn’t exist
Then look around better, ya blue waffle licker.
Are you so straight you use a ruler to stir your coffee?
You sure set them straight with that reply!
1st off, kudos for taking the feedback and criticism in a constructive manner, instead of getting defensive! Something we see way too little of.
Tell me what you think should and should not be included as “off limits topics.”
Lemmy is almost entirely adults. Given our content, I doubt we have any prepubescent kids in our audience. I see no reason for content filters beyond what is required by basic decency and common sense. Beyond that, as long as it fulfils the basic criteria of being a dad joke (groan inducing), let it stand or die on its up (and down) votes.
Dad jokes are jokes by dads to make their kids cringe. Not to overstep boundaries. And there nothing wrong with LGBTQ+ themed jokes.
Off limits topics for dadjokes?
Nothing. It’s dadjokes. Some dads are more crass.
Ban people being racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and otherwise bigoted. But besides people being shitty, stop promoting puritan ideals and values, they don’t work and are extremely counterproductive and damaging.
The issue here is that by you removing the joke in question, you yourself have done something bigoted. The same as a police officer breaking the law and hurting somebody. YOU have fucked up.<<<<<
A joke acknowledging the existence of gay and bi people is not “unclean” or somehow unreasonable to tell in the company of people of any age. That joke made in the style of “Hi Hungry, I’m Dad!” absolutely belongs in the Dad Jokes community.
When I think of dad jokes I think of adding jokes to my quiver for kids up to around 12 years old, not that I would ever stop telling them. They are jokes that don’t require a huge amount of context like who a politician is or historical events and so on, nor are they talking about sex and sexuality. The jokes should never be hurtful to anyone, and should never punch down for sure.
They should also not be morbid but definitely can be gross, so no to death but yes to poop. Appearance is also not ideal, so low hanging fruit like fat jokes and blonde jokes that are reductive and cruel are not good. In general cruelty is not acceptable for me, it stops being a dad joke and becomes a mean joke. The jokes have to have a level of cringe in them, something groanworthy.
I also think the joy of a dad joke is that the kids can join in. The structure is simple enough for kids to understand and over time replicate, so it goes from you making the joke and them working to understand it to you starting the joke and them predicting and eventually responding with an extension of the joke. This is how they learn to make jokes in the first place and this is why they can’t be cruel of mean, it teaches what is and is not acceptable to joke about. My parents made fairly bad jokes, but my partner’s family made racist jokes and cruel jokes, so my partner has spent a lot of time working to remove those from their process for jokes. It is hard work we don’t need to give the kids around us, so I feel that we should avoid it as much as possible.
Children are born loving their parents, and should figure out pretty quickly that their parents love each other (sometimes even if they don’t). Understanding the gist of marriage should therefore come pretty naturally to children, whether gay or straight. If they’re perceiving straight marriage as normal and gay marriage as odd, then that’s something they’ve been taught rather than their natural state that needs protecting and preserving until they’re older.
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You don’t have to remove everything that doesn’t exactly fit. Just let the post be if it’s in the gray area
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Assume good faith. They can think the joke violates community rules without being homophobic. I’m kind of on the fence myself.
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The rule is (emphasis mine):
If you cannot tell this joke to a 5-year-old and they can understand, you probably shouldn’t post it here.
Yes, you can tell this joke to a 5-year-old, but would they be able to understand? Some might, but I think >95% of 5-year-olds would not understand this joke. That’s why, on paper, it’s a violation of community rules, perhaps subject to one’s interpretation.
Reporting that something is a violation of community rules is not the same as disliking or hating something. If I see a really funny joke on a “Programmer Humor” community but it has nothing to do with programming, I might still report it because it doesn’t fit that community. Doesn’t mean I hate the joke. And if the non-programming joke involved LGBTQ+, you’d still call me bigoted for it.
I know plenty of 5 year olds who understand orientation just fine.
It depends a lot on why one thinks this joke is inappropriate for dad jokes.
Copying from my response to the other reply:
The rule is (emphasis mine):
If you cannot tell this joke to a 5-year-old and they can understand, you probably shouldn’t post it here.
Yes, you can tell this joke to a 5-year-old, but would they be able to understand? Some might, but I think >95% of 5-year-olds would not understand this joke. That’s why, on paper, it’s a violation of community rules, perhaps subject to one’s interpretation.
Reporting that something is a violation of community rules is not the same as disliking or hating something. If I see a really funny joke on a “Programmer Humor” community but it has nothing to do with programming, I might still report it because it doesn’t fit that community. Doesn’t mean I hate the joke. And if the non-programming joke involved LGBTQ+, [ayyy] would still call me bigoted for it.
FWIW I am not the one who reported that post, and I don’t think I would have, but I don’t see any grounds for calling them “homophobic monsters”.
Thinking that kids can’t understand gay people existing is homophobic whether the person who reported it is conscious of their bias or not.
I guess that depends on your interpretation of “can understand”. The joke in question was:
I’m gay and my husband’s bi and there’s nothing he loves more than when people ask if he’s gay and he gets to say “I’m not gay but my husband is”
To understand this joke, you have to understand:
- what ‘gay’ is
- what ‘bi’ is
- that someone who is bi is not gay, e.g. someone can describe bi as “both gay and straight”, which is an easy explanation that gets most of the point across, like you’d explain to a 5-year-old, but doesn’t fit this joke
- how to do the mental arithmetic of who’s saying what - OP is talking about his husband, who enjoys saying something about himself and his husband… It even gave me pause, it’s hard to follow
- what the joke is, after having gone through all the above, and understand that this is a fun (and uncommon!) way of expressing it
that’s a heck of a lot to expect from a 5 year old.
My 5 year old knew I was bisexual then. He understood that his grandfathers are gay. Pretending like gay people’s existence is confusing for children is homophobic.
Eew why would a 5 year old know anything about sexual preferences nevertheless anything sex related? You have to be a troll or bot or both. Normal people don’t think these things are normal. A 5 year old??? How would that even come up?
If the point of the joke involves mature topics they are uncle jokes, not dad jokes. There’s a place for both and I enjoy both.
Honestly if there’s any question or doubt then refrain from it here.
The flip side of that coin is that this is a text format so its not like readers can’t pick and choose what they choose to like and up/down vote. We’re not in a rigid world.
I think no one here disagrees with that. The disagreement is whether or not “gay people exist” is a mature topic.
It’s not. Don’t be silly.
Yes. I agree. I was getting that from the context of the post, and I think that can be left up to the reader to maturely ingest and up/down vote.
Arguing that xyz people exist or not isn’t the point. Its a matter of if it is part of the joke or not. If “2 guys” are just 2 guys in a joke I don’t care what they are. They can be gay, straight, black, Jewish whatever. But if it becomes part of the joke, then the fact that they are gay makes it sexual which then makes it an uncle joke. If its based on heterosexual sexuality its then not a dad joke either. Same for ethnicity and religion and everything else “taboo”.
Again, I missed the original drama that started this, but its OK to segregate jokes into different categories and its also OK to not be too sensitive over gray area.
It doesn’t though. A joke can be about gays without it being about gay sex. There’s a million dad jokes that hinge on having a straight partner, why is that not sexual but hinging on a gay partner is?
I don’t see what you see. A million dad jokes hinging on a straight partner? I don’t see that. Most dad jokes have nothing to do with any relationship like that.
But I agree with your premise, if that joke exists and it can be told as a gay partner then its fine.
Yo @loopy, just wanted to leave my spectating/appreciation here for a mod that gives their best, is transparent and willing to adapt. Also for the grace with which you took the criticism that could have been formulated a lot more appreciatively. You’re da real mvp. Thank you
was basing my moderating on what was being reported and sex being a topic as understood for children closer to puberty
I think you may have some misconceptions about the physical and mental development children.
Most children begin puberty around 8-9 years old… If you are cutting dad jokes down to topics appropriate for prepubescent children that leaves out the vast majority of the time people raising their kids.
The only thing I have a real opinion on is the question of profanity, as you’ve obviously changed your perspective on the original matter.
Curse words in dad jokes are fine if, and only if, they’re part of the word play. Which isn’t going to happen often, but it still has a place in dad jokes.
Dad jokes aren’t purely about little kids. They’re the kind of left field thinking that elicits groans as much laughter. Word play is the central concept, with puns being the dominant form. It’s kinda like swifties, as in [Tom Swift](The Joy of Tom Swifties - Merriam-Webster), not Taylor. As an example, from the source I linked: “the thermostat is too high”, said Tom heatedly.
The underlying concept is the same, it’s the format that differs. The dad joke equivalent of the above would be something like, “who turned the thermostat up? That gets me hot under the collar” or something similar.
There’s no reason you can’t do word play with curse words. If you’re in a household where cursing isn’t proscribed, a kid might say something like “teacher is really riding my ass this week”, to which you might respond, “I didn’t know you had a donkey”.
So, while I do think that curse words shouldn’t be just thrown in randomly, it’s about keeping the structure and fluidity of the format rather than the words themselves. Your prototypical dad joke won’t have cursing because it unnecessarily draws the word play out.
