Are Ted Jokes the new Dad Jokes?

The TV show Ted Lasso has changed the way I think about comedy.

One of the show’s main comedic devices is that Ted is constantly making odd references to pop culture — often American pop culture, with which his overseas team is not necessarily familiar — and encourages others to do likewise. A sampling is embedded below.

Some people think of these references as “dad jokes,” but, to me, dad jokes are groaningly obvious puns that expect very little of the listener. In contrast, the deftness of Ted’s banter makes the allusions harder to grasp, but provides incentives to keep up as well as you can.

When I’m speaking, even when I’m trying to be clever, keep-up-if-you-can is not my natural style. I generally want people to be able to follow along and avoid confusion.

But watching Ted Lasso has reminded me that momentary confusion is often OK. If I hear a reference that I don’t get, it’s easy enough to think, “Oh, I guess that’s a movie I never saw” and move on. My comprehension and enjoyment of the scene as a whole are not greatly compromised. Conversely, when I do recognize an obscure reference, there’s a special pleasure in being in on the joke.

In short, Ted has convinced me to occasionally attempt an odd reference without fretting too too much about whether everyone will understand it. At least when I’m in a classroom — the closest thing I have to a television audience.

Earlier this year I asked students to make a biological prediction (I can’t remember the details), and then I revealed some data that would affirm or refute their predictions. I wanted to emphasize that making predictions and then testing them is how science works, and also how people learn in general, and that it’s perfectly fine if one’s predictions don’t always pan out.

“It’s OK if you were expecting these data,” I ad-libbed. “But it’s also OK if you were surprised. It’s even OK if you were so surprised that, like a post-Beatles Paul McCartney, you wrote a song called ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ to express the extent of your surprise!”

I’m not sure how funny this was in the context of this particular class, but I could picture Ted sitting there amongst my students, and he was nodding with approval.