Nihilist Dad Jokes

Why did the scarecrow win a prize? Because he stood alone in his field! He stood there for years, rotting, until he was forgotten.

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I tell my kids, you’re allowed to watch the TV all you want… Just don’t turn it on! This way they will begin to understand the futility of all things.

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How does a penguin build a house? Igloos it together. Like all animals, it is an automaton, driven by blind genetic imperative, marching slowly to oblivion.

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Why don’t skeletons go trick or treating? They have no body to go with them! The skeletons are like us: alone, empty, dead already.

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I don’t really like playing soccer. I just do it for kicks! Like all of humanity, I pretend to enjoy things, and others pretend to care about my charade.

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You hear about the moon restaurant? Good food, no atmosphere! If you eat there, you forfeit your life, which would make no difference to the universe as a whole.

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Why did the blonde focus on an orange juice container? It said concentrate! She realized that society’s depictions of her were like the juice: formulaic, insipid, fake.

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My wife told me to put the cat out. I didn’t know it was on fire! By the time I could act, it was incinerated, a harbinger of the path we all must take.

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How come the invisible man wasn’t offered a job? They just couldn’t see him doing it! This man stands for all of us: unseen, misunderstood, irrelevant.

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Today I gave away my old batteries… Free of charge! No one wanted them, so I became angry and threw them in the yard. The battery acid now leaks into the soil, killing a colony of ants. A sparrow eats their bodies and is poisoned. Somewhere in the Serengeti, a lion devours his rival’s cubs. Then the lion is shot by a poacher and sold to an unloved rich man whose father was an unloved rich man. In five billion years, the Sun will become a bloated giant, boiling the oceans and consuming our pointless cruelties with flames. I wake sweat-drenched and screaming, staring at the visage of a faceless god. “WHAT HAVE I DONE?! HOW COULD I BRING A CHILD INTO THIS WORLD!?” But this god, like all gods, is nothing—just my son’s Wilson baseball mitt, sitting on my dresser, mocking me.

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Will February March? No, but April May! Soon we become ash, and time forgets us.

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Read an interview with Alex Baia about the making of this piece.