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Four and a half years ago, Tom Schruben started posting a daily “bad dad joke” on a white board in the yard of his home in Kensington, Maryland. It was at the height of the pandemic, a scary time when people weren’t talking to each other much. So the father decided he could offer some comic relief.
The bad dad jokes quickly became the highlight of the day for neighbors walking by. Some just chuckled, others made a point to tell Tom how much they appreciated them and a few even wrote him letters to thank him for the humor. One woman shared that she would take photos of the jokes everyday and send them to her dad, who was battling Covid in the hospital, as encouragement.
Tom knows from personal experience that laughter can be medicine for grief, two of his six children passed away at young ages from medical complications. So he’s still at it with the bad dad jokes, nearly 16-hundred days in a row of them, so far. And some are pretty bad, like “I got kicked out of mime school. I think it might have been something I said.” But he’ll keep posting them, as he points out, “Even small distractions can have a big impact.”
