Humor plays a huge role in people’s lives. They tend to look for a partner with a good sense of humor, can benefit from being funny at work, and even use it as a coping mechanism during stressful periods.

But the fact that humor is universally accepted as an essential part of our lives doesn’t mean that we all like the same kind of humor. If you would like to test it out for yourself, share a dad joke or some dark humor in a public place and watch the people there divide slowly into teams of ‘laughing’ and ‘not laughing.’

Even though the kind of humor people prefer tends to differ from person to person, there are shared similarities among people belonging to the same group. A study of the humor style tendencies among individuals of different ages and genders found that men tend to prefer aggressive humor, while their female counterparts are more drawn to affiliative humor—the kind that allows them to enhance their relationships with others in a positive way.

The aforementioned study also found that the age group of adolescents to college kids prefer affiliative humor, while adults show interest in affiliative as well as self-enhancing humor. On the other hand, older adults tend to use mostly self-enhancing humor. According to the study, people’s preferences for self-enhancing humor tend to increase with age.

Clearly, in one way or another, humor is important for people of all ages. One of the reasons for that is its significance in the way we communicate with each other and form relationships.

Discussing the importance of humor in communication and interpersonal relationships in an interview with Bored Panda, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Joseph Hellige, noted that humor serves several functions in communication. “It sometimes serves as a light-hearted ice breaker,” he said. “Jokes and other types of humor may deliver a serious message in a non-threatening way, especially when accompanied by a wry smile and wink of the eye. We bond to mutual laughter and to people with whom we share an ‘in joke.’”

If you’ve heard anything about humor theories, you’ll know that one of them is linked to something presented by the expert—the fact that our brains are wired to react to unexpected events. It’s the incongruity theory, based on the “perception of something incongruous – something that violates our mental patterns and expectations,” as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it.

According to said Encyclopedia, “This approach to joking is similar to techniques of stand-up comedians today. They speak of the set-up and the punch (line). The set-up is the first part of the joke: it creates the expectation. The punch (line) is the last part that violates that expectation. In the language of the Incongruity Theory, the joke’s ending is incongruous with the beginning.”

While unpredictability is often the reason we find jokes funny, some of them can be predictably not funny. “Jokes can backfire when the recipient finds them offensive, and sometimes this is predictable, when the jokes are racist, make fun of people with disabilities, contain thinly-veiled insults,” Hellige noted.

“[Though] sometimes the offensive nature of a joke is unpredictable; it evokes an idiosyncratic negative response in a particular individual, but not more generally in the population,” he added.

Prof. Hellige continued to point out that even dad jokes can start to backfire for the person who never stops telling them. “At some point, it just gets annoying!”

If you’ve enjoyed this list of dad jokes, you might enjoy this joke, too, shared by Prof. Hellige, which perfectly encapsulates the essence of dad humor:

“What do you call a hippie’s wife?

Mississippi.”