EDITORIAL: Dear Dads: Little Leah's got it right

Surrounded by family — parents, grandmother, aunt and two uncles — Little Leah made a statement of fact as if it were as inarguable as 2+2=4 or “We need air to breathe.”

“Dad jokes,” Leah said, “are bad jokes.”

The recently turned 8-year-old might have been condemning dad jokes to the smelliest scrapheap of humor. Or, the sweet girl might simply have been restating a universal truth. To qualify as a dad joke, the suckah’s gotta be ripe. The worse it is, the better.

Just a few days before Father's Day, Leah’s pronouncement encourages those of us who proudly wear the mantle of Pop to reflect on some of the qualities good dads hold in common.

Dads treat moms with more than respect. They treat them with love unleashed and never tethered.

Dads read to their kids.

A lot.

They guide them with wisdom, compassion and consistency.

Being human, dads’ actions might occasionally slip into the hypocritical category — but dads work hard not to become hypocrites.

Good dads tell their kids what they need to know about life.

Better dads listen.

And yes, the palette of paints with which dads create their masterpieces, some of whom grow up to be dads themselves, includes dad jokes. The worse, the better.

We have scoured more than 200 dad jokes on the internet and cannot come up with The Very Best (Which Means The Very Worst), but for Father's Day 2023, here’s a pretty goodbad one:

What has two butts and kills people?

An assassin!

OK, that’s actually funny, so let’s try again:

I caught my son chewing on electrical cords, so I had to ground him. He’s doing better currently and now conducting himself properly.

Happy Father's Day to the guys who know that groans are almost as good as laughs.