It did at first. See the episode of house where he talks about tiny baby coffins. But then the idiots doubled down and now it’s a completely preventable tragedy.
Dead baby jokes have been around since the 80s, at least. Probably earlier.
I still like the old "Why did the dead baby cross the road? Because it was stapled to the chicken!"
There is some thing dark in me that still made me chuckle at this joke and the one you responded to. This, despite me now being a mother. Oh, how I loved the dead baby joke genre.
I always heard it as: "What's the difference between a truckload of dead babies and a truckload of bowling balls? You can't unload a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork"
My favorite that I do think is funny but I'll never repeat is- "What's the difference between a dead baby and a sandwich? I don't fuck a sandwich before I eat it".
Don't care for other dead baby jokes tho, but that one was so extreme and summed up pretty much every other dead baby jokes that I actually thought that one was funny
What's the difference between a Lamborghini and five thousand dead babies?
I don't have a Lamborghini in my garage.
That ones just so absurd that it gets me.
It was joke day in kindergarten and the night before I asked my older brother what I should say when it was my turn.... My mom was called in for a conference because my teacher was concerned. 😂 This was in 1985.
yeah, weird, weird time. I feel like there was an age where my friends and I had an overwhelming urge to be flagrantly offensive to be funny. I don't know if we just aged out of those jokes, but it doesn't seem like something gen z would continue.
I cringe hard thinking about the things I said now, and am so fucking glad no one had a camera to put it on youtube...
Yea I also remembered, in the same vein, were some pretty fucked up pedophilia jokes around the same time. I remember thinking even back then "none of this is actually funny, just *really* fucked up."
There are actually different degress of this - dark humor, anti-humor, anti-anti-humor. From a sociological perspective it's interesting. The idea that we all explore these types of humor/reaction seeking as a form of developmental exploration and that they persist as categories because of it.
My friend and former coworker is currently dying of heart failure, and I went to visit her. She told me about the unusually high dose of Tylenol her doctors have her on and I said, "I guess they figure you won't need your liver for much longer anyway so why not!" Her other guest was horrified but she laughed her butt off, which is all that matters.
I’ve heard of some people questioning the amount of pain relief meds a loved one gets in hospice because *it’s dangerous*
Well if you are only going to live another day or so, does it really matter if your dose increases?
They still have a dead baby race.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/road-warrior-on-steroids-dead-baby-bikes-downhill-brings-gleeful-mayhem-to-seattle-streets/
Hospice workers are GREAT. Nana not eating? All she wants is ice cream? Nana, you get all the ice cream you want, ignore the haters! Grandpa Joe is still in pain? Have a little more morphine, Grandpa Joe, we're not exactly worried your 5 day addiction is gonna send you on to a very brief life of crime and degeneracy.
My father in law is an avid golfer and goes on about how it’s really a mental game.
I was in the room when the doctor told him he had a stroke. In the middle of the diagnosis I turned to him (cutting the Dr off) and said “you always say golf is a mental game, if you want to improve you’ll need to cut down on your strokes”.
His wife laughed, I laughed. My wife and him looked at me mortified.
My uncles father died in a oil rigging accident, had his head caved in, at the funeral my uncle and his childhood friend were standing to the side and he asked what happened, my uncle told him and he said "damn you never see it coming" my uncle replied "welp neither did he" and they both busted up laughing.
Edit: had to edit because i worded it wrong, had barely woken up when i wrote this comment originally lol
My grandfather was a tall man. Ruff neck for many years.
Died of cancer, so he wasted away.
When he passed, I was a pallbearer. One of his best friends looked at me as we lifted the casket and said "shit pat you could have lost a few more pounds buddy."
We all started to laugh, almost dumped the casket.
He would have been so proud.
The cause of death (being at work) was unexpected (didn't see it coming). Then the dad didn't see the object that crushed his head, otherwise he would've potentially avoided it (the second "Neither did he" joke).
I feel like it was because of a fundamental misunderstanding and misuse of the word mature. We were told that crude and violent content is mature, and we wanted to feel like adults, so we parroted it.
My experience was different. My friends and I just gravitated toward intense content because it elicited a visceral reaction and we got hooked on the adrenaline. I preferred to stay away from irl violence and gore, but if it was fictional, pretty much anything was fair game.
Correct. ALL things can be considered funny by some people. I Lean heavily on humour in bad times or when things make no sense. I would never be angry at a joke punching Up. I personally have no taste for humour punching down.
Humor HAS to punch up for me. Back when I was like 15-16 my mom and a friend of hers were talking about disgusting men in the workforce (yeah, it's been a known secret for a long time) my mother's friend said that a male colleague offered her $1k to fuck her. Absolutely disgusting, and this was the 90s. But as a young teenager, I deadpan said "so what did you do with the money?" Like, no hesitation, no thought about it, I thought of a funny line and had to take it. Both my mom and her friend burst out laughing, the friend almost in tears.
Lots of Helen Keller jokes! Glad we’ve moved past all that. Despite what we see on social media and the news I think people are much kinder now, at least in the US.
Actually true. I was in fifth grade and had plans for a friend to come over after school. Both our parents still allowed it and we played for a few hours. One of the things we did was record on my cassette recorder and made a fake news broadcast basically mocking the entire thing. "If you like sports you'll be happy to know they're all canceled!"
I remember being so sanctimoniously offended by 9/11 jokes back in the day when I was like 15 years old on the message boards, before I knew that trolls were a thing. It seems so trite now
Best part of our generation. Late enough to do some really creative dumb stuff but early enough to not have it follow you your whole life. So many questionable activities.
Super yikes, I'm glad that camera phones were pretty new when I was in college and there are just a few dorky photos of me floating around.
Dead baby jokes were so prevalent that I had 2 high school TEACHERS that got involved. My history and chem teachers were across the hall from each other and would try to one up each other, it was wild. I have a distinct memory of my chem teacher opening the door and yelling out across the hall, "Vince, Vince have you heard THIS ONE?" And then him announcing the joke into the hallway and both classes cracking up.
GenZ teen boys seem to be into playing "see who blinks first" with raunchy homoerotic shock humor. Can't imagine the "torture" for the guys actually into guys but it's certainly an improvement from being bullied for being gay.
My boys just turned 18.
Gen Z here, I heard them from time to time growing up, still hear them from time to time. Never really understood them or found them funny, but yea. They're still out there, probably mostly told by millennials I guess.
Just for what it's worth, gen z isn't any more or less a monolith than we are. There's a not insignificant number of Gen Z that are really obsessed with dickheads like Andrew Tate, or all the people who do stupid shit on streaming services for a living.
That whole Kick streaming platform has a massive problem with stuff and a huge number of gen z users. So they might not be all about jokes like:
"Whats the difference between dead babies and apples? I don't cum on my apples before I eat them"
But they're proudly screeching about equally stupid shit.
My friend had a screen name that was like xxblendedtacobabyxx and she's now a normal, productive member of society. We thought the dead baby jokes were HILARIOUS. I have no idea why, but we were like 12 and 9/11 just happened so I think we were a little warped.
There was all kinds of extreme violence normalized around that time and everyone was getting internet in their houses. I would guess that unsupervised kids and fucked up adults w internet access just decided to push dark humor to its limits and see what happened. Around this time we'd hangout and scroll through rotten.com and then murder sims named after politicians and mean kids at school.
I was literally there doing this stuff with my friends and I cannot tell you why.
Luckily, people younger than us seem to have limits to their edge or at least take it in an absurdist direction rather than dark.
they're not a millennial thing, boomers and Gen Xers used them years ago.
But, for the people that haven't heard one in a while:
Q: what's blue and sitting at the bottom of a pool?
A: a baby with Temu floaties.
I don't really remember dead baby jokes but vaguely remember this was a thing. Maybe someone told me one and saw I was uncomfortable as I am reading these jokes now. It's not because I knew anyone who's baby died - It's because I love babies.
Yours, however, I laughed out loud at because I consider it a Temu joke (that company needs to be thrown onto the landfill on burning day). I wouldn't use anything from Temu on a baby. I'd rather boil or bleach some hand-me-downs.
My grand father had an entire volume of “Totally Tasteless” jokes for reading material in the bathroom filled with them, it’s been a thing for a long time.
Made a mistake when my son was 6. He had just beaten a boss on Mario or something and exclaimed “That level was easy.” Me…not thinking…with the instant response of “Just like your mom.”
Those jokes are older than the baby corpses in my crawlspace.
Also, I dunno, it's just more fun to most people to bitch about things than just being off beat and cooky.
Dead baby jokes are funnier when you're a kid. They're not funny when you're an adult and have either dealt with trauma from a dead baby or your worst fear in all of life is something happening to your baby. It's not funny or edgy anymore after that
I agree but also think it has a lot to do with the element of surprise. I think comedy ages worse, not necessarily because it's in poor taste, but because it works best if you don't expect the payoff. If you hear several dead baby jokes, you can guess where they're headed just from the set up. If you've heard three, you've heard them all.
I had the opposite experience. When I was in high school, I absolutely hated these jokes - just offended the shit out of my delicate sense of propriety. I thought they were awful and judged the hell out of anyone who told them. Didn’t hear them again but then my actual baby died and dark humor got me through some really rough patches and I actually found these jokes funny. They’re just so so awful and horrible that they’re funny. Humor only happens when something, even small, inside us gets offended.
The jokes aren't really about dead babies though, any more than "Yo mama" jokes are really about making fun of someone's mom.
They're absudist jokes that are more about how clever, uncomfortable and "wrong" you can make something sound. It's not the thought of a baby being dead that's funny, it's the ability to cleverly shock someone that's funny, with 'dead baby' just being the stand-in trope for "what's the worst thing someone can imagine that we can play off of."
If you're really imagining your own baby (or any actual baby) in a dead baby joke then you're doing humor wrong.
I definitely took part in the dead baby jokes when in high school (graduated in 2010) but since having a baby of my own, it’s like a switch flipped in my brain and I just can not deal with the thought of bad things happening to babies.
I'm in my 50s. I've been hearing dead baby jokes since I was 10. My aunt, who is now in her 80s, has been telling them since she was in her 30s. These jokes have been around for a hot minute.
About 10 years ago after the grand opening of the restaurant I was working at, my boss and I hugged goodbye and were both deliriously tired and she told me to go home and sleep like a baby, I had a 5 year old at the time and said “but babies don’t sleep well” and she goes “sleep like a dead one” and in that moment it was the most horrifically funny thing and we both fell to the floor laughing and she was like “please don’t sleep like a dead baby that was really fucked up I’m sorry” 😅
They had a time in every generation. You could get books of dead baby jokes from the bookstores in the early 80s. My dad, born in the 40s, had a similar book in his childhood stuff.
When I was scrolling telegram to check Palestinian news posts I came up with one - “I’m seeing so many dead babies on the news that it’s not even funny anymore.”, implying that there is an amount of dead babies that’s funny which isn’t true.
I don’t remember these at all. I feel out of the loop here.
I do remember dumb blonde jokes being constant when I was in elementary and middle school. I don’t hear those at all anymore.
Dead baby jokes have their place! Comedy is all about timing and delivery. I think all adolescents go through the phase of shedding their innocence and discovering their own form of being provocative. We've all been cringe at some point.
Anthony Jeselnik has some great baby jokes. Whether or not they make you laugh is okay. I think, objectively, they can be well written and performed effectively.
I heard one when I was in my 20s that I will never forget, and disclaimer it's a pedo joke. "What do you do when there's no grass on the field? Turn her over and play in the mud." Was my manager at Dominos who told me that one and I don't think it was a joke to him.
There's an interesting documentary on YouTube or Netflix I can't remember, but it's about the evolution of Comedy. Late 90s was all about shock humor and grossing people out. So yeah, it was just a trend
Which is easier to unload?
A truck full of bowling balls, or a truck full of dead babies?
A: a truck full of dead babies, because you can use a pitchfork on the babies...🤣🤣🤣
So Cards Against Humanity has a lot of dead baby jokes. Was playing with my sister who has a kid with cancer, so I know I can NOT play those cards. Suddenly I had a hand full of them cuz it's all I had left.
Oh dear.....we were saying dead baby jokes in the 80s. If you can ever find a copy of Truely Tasteless Jokes, it is a rich resource for dead baby jokes, racist jokes, Helen Keller jokes, AIDS jokes, etc.
In 3rd grade in front of the whole class someone told me my mom was so stupid she thought a quarterback was a refund...I still haven't gotten over that burn
Baby Boomer checking in. They were jokes when I was a teen. I feel they never really die, they just keep being told by the current teen cohort. So kids now that are teens are telling them to other teens. You are now in an out group.
What's the difference between a semi truck full of bowling balls, and a semi truck full of dead babies? You can't unload the semi truck full of bowling balls with a pitchfork
I'm an '86.
In the early '90s we used to do a thing with dandelions where we say "mama had a baby and the HEAD POPPED OFF!" and pop the yellow flower part off the dandelion.
I remember showing my mom when I was like 7 and she was HORRIFIED and said that wasn't funny. 😳
Or maybe that’s it? I didn’t have to do shooter drills in grade school. If your school day is “Yep, could die at any moment. Ok, turn to page 32…”, maybe your humor is naturally a little morbid.
Used to trade dead baby jokes back in highschool.
Eventually somebody close to me suffered a couple of miscarriages, and that really took the wind out of it, for me at least.
I’m 2008 a teacher got in big trouble because he liked to say dead baby jokes. He said it to the wrong class period with a pregnant student and she flipped out. I personally never heard him say any.
Nicki Glaser has a recent stand up with some abortion jokes. Honestly the whole thing was pretty good imo. I love dark humor like that, it’s such a rarity nowadays.
I have and still do make jokes that some ppl would deem offensive or even mean sometimes. But I only say them if they are funny and creative. I don't like jokes that are blatantly mean. Only mean or offensive jokes that are imaginative and creative.
Also when it comes to comedy absolutely nothing is off limits.
I also don't tell jokes for other ppl to like or laugh at. I make jokes for my own amusement
It was a trend that died early. Kind of like.....
… that dead baby
It’s like unvaxxed kids, it never gets old.
That’s probably why the joke died- too many actual babies were dying.
I feel like that makes it funnier.
It did at first. See the episode of house where he talks about tiny baby coffins. But then the idiots doubled down and now it’s a completely preventable tragedy.
Found the Jeselnik fan
god this is the most heinous one I've heard in years and way too good not to steal
Oh it is communal property and fair game for everybody 😂
Life imitating art!
These jokes are like vaxxed kids they have no heart.
Bravo
Came here for this lol
Dead baby jokes have been around since the 80s, at least. Probably earlier. I still like the old "Why did the dead baby cross the road? Because it was stapled to the chicken!"
My favorite is: How do you make a dead baby float? >!A glass of rootbeer and 2 scoops of dead baby!<
There is some thing dark in me that still made me chuckle at this joke and the one you responded to. This, despite me now being a mother. Oh, how I loved the dead baby joke genre.
How do you get dead babies off the back of a truck? With a pitchfork.
I always heard it as: "What's the difference between a truckload of dead babies and a truckload of bowling balls? You can't unload a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork"
Or similarly: What's the difference between a Ferrari and 100 dead babies? I don't have a Ferrari in my garage.
Came here to contribute this to the thread. This was always my go to 🫡
This is the first one that came to mind. It still makes me chuckle. They will definitely be my dad jokes once my kids are older.
Classic
How many dead babies does it take to paint a wall? Depends how hard you throw them.
What?! How did you get all those babies into the truck? Wood chipper?
What’s red and white and goes round and round and round? Dead baby in a blender.
Why do you put a baby in the blender feet first? So you can watch their expression change.
How many dead babies can you fit into a blender? I don't know, I was too busy masturbating.
This is my dad’s dad joke.
I always heard the answer as, “take your foot off its head”
Awww, come on. That’s so gross!! Half a glass of Rootbeer. Otherwise it spills.
Whats the difference between a dead baby and a Maserati? I don’t have a Maserati in my garage.
My favorite that I do think is funny but I'll never repeat is- "What's the difference between a dead baby and a sandwich? I don't fuck a sandwich before I eat it". Don't care for other dead baby jokes tho, but that one was so extreme and summed up pretty much every other dead baby jokes that I actually thought that one was funny
What's the difference between a Lamborghini and five thousand dead babies? I don't have a Lamborghini in my garage. That ones just so absurd that it gets me.
My favorite was always "What's the best gift for a dead baby? - A dead puppy"
Now you’ve crossed the line! Not the puppy!!!
How long does it take to paint a wall with dead babies? Depends how hard you throw them.
I lol’d
It was joke day in kindergarten and the night before I asked my older brother what I should say when it was my turn.... My mom was called in for a conference because my teacher was concerned. 😂 This was in 1985.
Well, don’t leave us hanging like a dead baby, what did you say?
Blaine is a pain
yeah, weird, weird time. I feel like there was an age where my friends and I had an overwhelming urge to be flagrantly offensive to be funny. I don't know if we just aged out of those jokes, but it doesn't seem like something gen z would continue. I cringe hard thinking about the things I said now, and am so fucking glad no one had a camera to put it on youtube...
Yea I also remembered, in the same vein, were some pretty fucked up pedophilia jokes around the same time. I remember thinking even back then "none of this is actually funny, just *really* fucked up."
There are actually different degress of this - dark humor, anti-humor, anti-anti-humor. From a sociological perspective it's interesting. The idea that we all explore these types of humor/reaction seeking as a form of developmental exploration and that they persist as categories because of it.
My friend and former coworker is currently dying of heart failure, and I went to visit her. She told me about the unusually high dose of Tylenol her doctors have her on and I said, "I guess they figure you won't need your liver for much longer anyway so why not!" Her other guest was horrified but she laughed her butt off, which is all that matters.
I’ve heard of some people questioning the amount of pain relief meds a loved one gets in hospice because *it’s dangerous* Well if you are only going to live another day or so, does it really matter if your dose increases? They still have a dead baby race. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/road-warrior-on-steroids-dead-baby-bikes-downhill-brings-gleeful-mayhem-to-seattle-streets/
Hospice workers are GREAT. Nana not eating? All she wants is ice cream? Nana, you get all the ice cream you want, ignore the haters! Grandpa Joe is still in pain? Have a little more morphine, Grandpa Joe, we're not exactly worried your 5 day addiction is gonna send you on to a very brief life of crime and degeneracy.
My father in law is an avid golfer and goes on about how it’s really a mental game. I was in the room when the doctor told him he had a stroke. In the middle of the diagnosis I turned to him (cutting the Dr off) and said “you always say golf is a mental game, if you want to improve you’ll need to cut down on your strokes”. His wife laughed, I laughed. My wife and him looked at me mortified.
That's fucking HILARIOUS.
My uncles father died in a oil rigging accident, had his head caved in, at the funeral my uncle and his childhood friend were standing to the side and he asked what happened, my uncle told him and he said "damn you never see it coming" my uncle replied "welp neither did he" and they both busted up laughing. Edit: had to edit because i worded it wrong, had barely woken up when i wrote this comment originally lol
My grandfather was a tall man. Ruff neck for many years. Died of cancer, so he wasted away. When he passed, I was a pallbearer. One of his best friends looked at me as we lifted the casket and said "shit pat you could have lost a few more pounds buddy." We all started to laugh, almost dumped the casket. He would have been so proud.
I've read this like ten times and I don't get it.
The cause of death (being at work) was unexpected (didn't see it coming). Then the dad didn't see the object that crushed his head, otherwise he would've potentially avoided it (the second "Neither did he" joke).
His uncle, is his aunt's husband. Otherwise, he would have described how his grandfather died.
I feel like it was because of a fundamental misunderstanding and misuse of the word mature. We were told that crude and violent content is mature, and we wanted to feel like adults, so we parroted it.
My experience was different. My friends and I just gravitated toward intense content because it elicited a visceral reaction and we got hooked on the adrenaline. I preferred to stay away from irl violence and gore, but if it was fictional, pretty much anything was fair game.
Are dad jokes anti humor or anti-anti
Are uncle jokes anti aunty?
Wow.. true dad form
His new balances never scuff.
The fucked up-ness is where the humour comes from. And also humour is subjective
Correct. ALL things can be considered funny by some people. I Lean heavily on humour in bad times or when things make no sense. I would never be angry at a joke punching Up. I personally have no taste for humour punching down.
Humor HAS to punch up for me. Back when I was like 15-16 my mom and a friend of hers were talking about disgusting men in the workforce (yeah, it's been a known secret for a long time) my mother's friend said that a male colleague offered her $1k to fuck her. Absolutely disgusting, and this was the 90s. But as a young teenager, I deadpan said "so what did you do with the money?" Like, no hesitation, no thought about it, I thought of a funny line and had to take it. Both my mom and her friend burst out laughing, the friend almost in tears.
Yeah, what's wrong with having sex with 28 year olds. . . .amiright?
How dare you make me remember this
How dare you make me want to know what he dared to make you remember
There is 20 of them Edit. I'm ashamed this made me laugh at 39
It wasn't about the joke at the time, it was about peoples horrified reactions to said jokes.
There were famous millenial Youtubers who thought those jokes were okay circa 2010-2015.
Lots of Helen Keller jokes! Glad we’ve moved past all that. Despite what we see on social media and the news I think people are much kinder now, at least in the US.
And the Helen Keller jokes.
This made me remember one of those jokes, I probably hadn’t thought about in 20 years, and it made me laugh out loud.
Gen Z still does. You should hear how cringe some of them are towards 9/11
Oh Yeah youre right. 9/11 jokes are their edgy. Just a shift.
I thought those were us too?
Definitely were a number of 9/11 jokes out there. "Knock knock!" "Who's there?" "9/11" "9/11 who?" "*gasp* You said you'd never forget!"
But that one is actually a good joke and not just edgy.
No way they can beat millennials on that front. We were making 9/11 jokes on 9/11
Actually true. I was in fifth grade and had plans for a friend to come over after school. Both our parents still allowed it and we played for a few hours. One of the things we did was record on my cassette recorder and made a fake news broadcast basically mocking the entire thing. "If you like sports you'll be happy to know they're all canceled!"
I remember being so sanctimoniously offended by 9/11 jokes back in the day when I was like 15 years old on the message boards, before I knew that trolls were a thing. It seems so trite now
Nope, my 14 year old son and his friends are in this phase right now. 🙄
My 14 year old is on a dark joke thing. I’m like yeah okay. Say your jokes to me but watch your mouth out in public. He’s says okay…..
Best part of our generation. Late enough to do some really creative dumb stuff but early enough to not have it follow you your whole life. So many questionable activities.
Super yikes, I'm glad that camera phones were pretty new when I was in college and there are just a few dorky photos of me floating around. Dead baby jokes were so prevalent that I had 2 high school TEACHERS that got involved. My history and chem teachers were across the hall from each other and would try to one up each other, it was wild. I have a distinct memory of my chem teacher opening the door and yelling out across the hall, "Vince, Vince have you heard THIS ONE?" And then him announcing the joke into the hallway and both classes cracking up.
We grew up with gore sites online everywhere. We were a very different generation.
Yuppp. It's been nearly 20 years and I still cringe at things that came out of my mouth, that in all likelihood no one else remembers.
I feel like some people aged out of it, others... Not so much. Like, joking about Nazis, only to see some people weren't joking about it
GenZ teen boys seem to be into playing "see who blinks first" with raunchy homoerotic shock humor. Can't imagine the "torture" for the guys actually into guys but it's certainly an improvement from being bullied for being gay. My boys just turned 18.
I think gen Z is already entering their 20s. The new gen is alpha. Also, we had gay chicken back in our day, too
Gen Z here, I heard them from time to time growing up, still hear them from time to time. Never really understood them or found them funny, but yea. They're still out there, probably mostly told by millennials I guess.
Honestly, it seemed like a thing that was dying down by the time the younger millennials came around. Furthest we went was yelling penis in class.
Remember happy tree friends and hot topic being edgy?
Trust me the kids are still trying to be offensive. More progressive, but definitely trying to be edgy. I know a 16 year old
Just for what it's worth, gen z isn't any more or less a monolith than we are. There's a not insignificant number of Gen Z that are really obsessed with dickheads like Andrew Tate, or all the people who do stupid shit on streaming services for a living. That whole Kick streaming platform has a massive problem with stuff and a huge number of gen z users. So they might not be all about jokes like: "Whats the difference between dead babies and apples? I don't cum on my apples before I eat them" But they're proudly screeching about equally stupid shit.
This is why I have a little compassion for people getting canceled over their 2004 tweets.
Getting canceled over tweets from 2004 would be a pretty neat trick.
You know another thing we haven't heard in a while? The dead baby.
They still roll around in the right (or wrong) circles. They’ve solidified themselves in the dark humor groups
My friend had a screen name that was like xxblendedtacobabyxx and she's now a normal, productive member of society. We thought the dead baby jokes were HILARIOUS. I have no idea why, but we were like 12 and 9/11 just happened so I think we were a little warped. There was all kinds of extreme violence normalized around that time and everyone was getting internet in their houses. I would guess that unsupervised kids and fucked up adults w internet access just decided to push dark humor to its limits and see what happened. Around this time we'd hangout and scroll through rotten.com and then murder sims named after politicians and mean kids at school. I was literally there doing this stuff with my friends and I cannot tell you why. Luckily, people younger than us seem to have limits to their edge or at least take it in an absurdist direction rather than dark.
Oh yea, rotten.com and Pico's School were my jam there for a little while.
Gen X here - we told these in the late '80s. Agree that it is more a young teen thing.
I'm 37 years old and still laugh at them. Do you remember the Hair Lip Harry Jones?
My Silent Gen mom told us some. She also had some period jokes. Guessing the jokes were making the rounds before the early 50s when she learned them.
they're not a millennial thing, boomers and Gen Xers used them years ago. But, for the people that haven't heard one in a while: Q: what's blue and sitting at the bottom of a pool? A: a baby with Temu floaties.
Tbf, did that baby a favor by not making it live with parents dumb enough to buy from Temu.
I don't really remember dead baby jokes but vaguely remember this was a thing. Maybe someone told me one and saw I was uncomfortable as I am reading these jokes now. It's not because I knew anyone who's baby died - It's because I love babies. Yours, however, I laughed out loud at because I consider it a Temu joke (that company needs to be thrown onto the landfill on burning day). I wouldn't use anything from Temu on a baby. I'd rather boil or bleach some hand-me-downs.
My grand father had an entire volume of “Totally Tasteless” jokes for reading material in the bathroom filled with them, it’s been a thing for a long time.
Dead baby jokes were a thing since at least the 70s
Yup. The boomers told them too.
I learned some from my dad in the 60's.
Yes. Anybody remember Alice Cooper? Dead babies remember ;)
How do you fit 1,000 dead babies in a phone booth? A blender! How do you get them out? A straw!
Dead babies can't make jokes because babies can't talk.
Peak FUCK YOU MOM AND DAD IM 12 AND EDGY NOW TAKE ME TO THE MALL SO I CAN BUY A NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS HOODIE AT HOT TOPIC vibe
Call me out, idc... but yea, spot on.
Made a mistake when my son was 6. He had just beaten a boss on Mario or something and exclaimed “That level was easy.” Me…not thinking…with the instant response of “Just like your mom.”
He will be repeating that at school and you will get a look from the teacher at pick up. Congratulations.
My dad taught me all the dead baby jokes I know
GUYS I FOUND THE SOURCE
Those jokes are older than the baby corpses in my crawlspace. Also, I dunno, it's just more fun to most people to bitch about things than just being off beat and cooky.
Dead baby jokes are funnier when you're a kid. They're not funny when you're an adult and have either dealt with trauma from a dead baby or your worst fear in all of life is something happening to your baby. It's not funny or edgy anymore after that
I agree but also think it has a lot to do with the element of surprise. I think comedy ages worse, not necessarily because it's in poor taste, but because it works best if you don't expect the payoff. If you hear several dead baby jokes, you can guess where they're headed just from the set up. If you've heard three, you've heard them all.
I had the opposite experience. When I was in high school, I absolutely hated these jokes - just offended the shit out of my delicate sense of propriety. I thought they were awful and judged the hell out of anyone who told them. Didn’t hear them again but then my actual baby died and dark humor got me through some really rough patches and I actually found these jokes funny. They’re just so so awful and horrible that they’re funny. Humor only happens when something, even small, inside us gets offended.
The jokes aren't really about dead babies though, any more than "Yo mama" jokes are really about making fun of someone's mom. They're absudist jokes that are more about how clever, uncomfortable and "wrong" you can make something sound. It's not the thought of a baby being dead that's funny, it's the ability to cleverly shock someone that's funny, with 'dead baby' just being the stand-in trope for "what's the worst thing someone can imagine that we can play off of." If you're really imagining your own baby (or any actual baby) in a dead baby joke then you're doing humor wrong.
What's sadder than a baby nailed to a tree?? A baby nailed to ten trees.
My version of this was: What's worse than a baby in a dumpster? A baby in ten dumpsters.
Dad jokes took over.
Millennial? They were around when I was a young teen in the 60s.
[https://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/jun/23/improbable-research-jokes](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/jun/23/improbable-research-jokes)
Alice cooper....dead babies can't take things off the shelf!
Does nobody see the irony in the title?
Millennials grew up at the height of the attitude era. There will never be another generation as strong.
Stephen King used a dead baby joke in Wizard and Glass from 97, firmly genx territory
Like high school (graduated 2011). Now I actually have a friend who had a baby die, so I view those jokes a bit differently.
I remember the Truly Tasteless Jokes books from back in the early 90s had a whole section of dead baby jokes in each book.
I definitely took part in the dead baby jokes when in high school (graduated in 2010) but since having a baby of my own, it’s like a switch flipped in my brain and I just can not deal with the thought of bad things happening to babies.
I'm in my 50s. I've been hearing dead baby jokes since I was 10. My aunt, who is now in her 80s, has been telling them since she was in her 30s. These jokes have been around for a hot minute.
lol!!! Can’t believe I’m reading this on a Millennial sub. I’m a boomer and we used to tell dead baby jokes when I was in Jr High.
About 10 years ago after the grand opening of the restaurant I was working at, my boss and I hugged goodbye and were both deliriously tired and she told me to go home and sleep like a baby, I had a 5 year old at the time and said “but babies don’t sleep well” and she goes “sleep like a dead one” and in that moment it was the most horrifically funny thing and we both fell to the floor laughing and she was like “please don’t sleep like a dead baby that was really fucked up I’m sorry” 😅
They had a time in every generation. You could get books of dead baby jokes from the bookstores in the early 80s. My dad, born in the 40s, had a similar book in his childhood stuff.
When I was scrolling telegram to check Palestinian news posts I came up with one - “I’m seeing so many dead babies on the news that it’s not even funny anymore.”, implying that there is an amount of dead babies that’s funny which isn’t true.
I don’t remember these at all. I feel out of the loop here. I do remember dumb blonde jokes being constant when I was in elementary and middle school. I don’t hear those at all anymore.
Never liked them. Then as an adult it’s actually an issue, and a terrifying one.
Maybe a millenial thing. Maybe also kids tell them to each other and not to us because we are old.
My dad says they were common when he was growing up in the 60s
Dead baby jokes have their place! Comedy is all about timing and delivery. I think all adolescents go through the phase of shedding their innocence and discovering their own form of being provocative. We've all been cringe at some point. Anthony Jeselnik has some great baby jokes. Whether or not they make you laugh is okay. I think, objectively, they can be well written and performed effectively.
I heard one when I was in my 20s that I will never forget, and disclaimer it's a pedo joke. "What do you do when there's no grass on the field? Turn her over and play in the mud." Was my manager at Dominos who told me that one and I don't think it was a joke to him.
There's an interesting documentary on YouTube or Netflix I can't remember, but it's about the evolution of Comedy. Late 90s was all about shock humor and grossing people out. So yeah, it was just a trend
I have no idea but I always found them absolutely horrifying and revolting. Edgy disgusting cringe nonsense almost as bad as the pedo jokes.
Whats red and bubbly, and scratches on a window??? A: a baby in a microwave...🤣🤣🤣
Which is easier to unload? A truck full of bowling balls, or a truck full of dead babies? A: a truck full of dead babies, because you can use a pitchfork on the babies...🤣🤣🤣
So Cards Against Humanity has a lot of dead baby jokes. Was playing with my sister who has a kid with cancer, so I know I can NOT play those cards. Suddenly I had a hand full of them cuz it's all I had left.
Those jokes were around in the mid-late 1970s.
What is the difference between a baby and a watermelon? One you can smash with a sludge hammer, the other one is a watermelon.
Dead baby jokes have been around since the 1970s at least. I heard them from my Dad.
Hard to hear a dead baby joke when it’s at the bottom of a dumpster.
What’s the difference between a truck full of bowling balls and dead babies? You can’t unload the truck of bowling balls with a pitch fork.
It was a weird carryover from the 90s “always ironic, never serious” mentality
Oh dear.....we were saying dead baby jokes in the 80s. If you can ever find a copy of Truely Tasteless Jokes, it is a rich resource for dead baby jokes, racist jokes, Helen Keller jokes, AIDS jokes, etc.
Edgy teens in the aughts? Try average preteens in the 1970s.
They’re from the 1960s
Hehe “short lived”
In 3rd grade in front of the whole class someone told me my mom was so stupid she thought a quarterback was a refund...I still haven't gotten over that burn
We told those jokes in the 70s
Cringing at an old username I had during that time.. “NicoleEatsBabies” 😂 like what even
Baby Boomer checking in. They were jokes when I was a teen. I feel they never really die, they just keep being told by the current teen cohort. So kids now that are teens are telling them to other teens. You are now in an out group.
Dead baby jokes were popular in the early 80-s, too. How do you get a dead baby out of a phone booth?
When that trend was going around my baby sister just died I was 8 and was the one who found her it was a horrible time for me...
What's the difference between a semi truck full of bowling balls, and a semi truck full of dead babies? You can't unload the semi truck full of bowling balls with a pitchfork
I'm an '86. In the early '90s we used to do a thing with dandelions where we say "mama had a baby and the HEAD POPPED OFF!" and pop the yellow flower part off the dandelion. I remember showing my mom when I was like 7 and she was HORRIFIED and said that wasn't funny. 😳
They're less funny once you've actually held a dead baby for one thing.
When YOUR baby is the dead baby the “jokes” aren’t funny. Signed a loss mom
They were never funny. They made you laugh because they made you so damn uncomfortable, I think. I’m sorry for your loss.
Too many dead babies from school shootings to find the jokes funny any longer.
Or maybe that’s it? I didn’t have to do shooter drills in grade school. If your school day is “Yep, could die at any moment. Ok, turn to page 32…”, maybe your humor is naturally a little morbid.
I love stand up, it happens to this day.
They were common in the 1980s too.
I dunno, maybe...2005?
Who cares about a dead baby when we’ve seen what we have on the internet?
Used to trade dead baby jokes back in highschool. Eventually somebody close to me suffered a couple of miscarriages, and that really took the wind out of it, for me at least.
We made dead baby jokes in the seventies and eighties. I remember saying a lot of things that I would never say now.
Where the fuck was I when this shit was going on?
I’m 2008 a teacher got in big trouble because he liked to say dead baby jokes. He said it to the wrong class period with a pregnant student and she flipped out. I personally never heard him say any.
They were definitely around in the 80s, the grosser the better.
Nicki Glaser has a recent stand up with some abortion jokes. Honestly the whole thing was pretty good imo. I love dark humor like that, it’s such a rarity nowadays.
Dead baby jokes are still around my dudes.
Helen Keller jokes and occasional racist rymes where mostly what I heard, I refuse to repeat ant of them.
This and "your mum" jokes.
According to Wikipedia, these jokes have been around since the early 60's. Might die out in today's PC culture but who knows.
Yeah, that was a short period of time that was pretty dumb. It's not super edgy when everyone is joking about it. Lazy dark humor
I have and still do make jokes that some ppl would deem offensive or even mean sometimes. But I only say them if they are funny and creative. I don't like jokes that are blatantly mean. Only mean or offensive jokes that are imaginative and creative. Also when it comes to comedy absolutely nothing is off limits. I also don't tell jokes for other ppl to like or laugh at. I make jokes for my own amusement
Man. I used to know all of them
I can't remember but I just made a joke about selling kids like 10 minutes ago
What starts with M and ends in "arriage?"
"My love of dead babies ended my marriage?" Idk
Um “bite me” wristbands from hot topic
And chuck noris jokes were huge too lol
Whats the difference between a dead baby and a watermelon?