Not just saying this because I’m a bird furry but it’s hard to understate just how unfunny “birds aren’t real” is as a bit. “Gingers have no soul” level joke
i feel like i'm not allowed to talk about how much i dislike this joke because, as a bird person, i think people are going to assume i have a personal moralistic problem with "birds aren't real". but i just don't like any joke where the punchline is that you have already heard the joke before.
"birds aren't real" is in the same category as "the cake is a lie", or "all your base are belong to us", or "then i took an arrow to the knee". it's a joke people say not to be funny, but to be joking.
and you know what, fine, i'll admit that it's really grating that 99% of the time i hear this joke it comes in the form of someone deliberately derailing a point i was making about birds. almost every time "birds aren't real" is dropped in my lap it takes the form of an obstacle i have to navigate everyone around to get back to my point. i love talking about birds, and i'm good at doing it, and when someone interrupts me with "birds aren't real" i make a mental note not to talk about my interests around them.
intriguingly, this is also what actually defines a "dad joke", and I'm always surprised that people misunderstand it so often. It makes me think that probably they didn't actually get this routine from their dads and have only picked it up from culture
A dad joke is specifically when you're having a conversation with the intent of achieving something, and your dad inserts an insidious pun that appears at first to be a serious response. One of the most classic forms of course is the "I'm hungry", "oh I thought you were [name]," but the ones that really get to you are the long form sort, where you ask something, he asks you a question in response, you answer, and then his reply reveals that he was just fucking with you and has no intention of following up on your desire
In other words, you're trying to actually accomplish something, you think you're making progress, and then you find out he got your hopes up only to close on a punchline. This is mostly a thing that happens when you're like 12 years old and keep asking for stuff you weren't going to get anyway, but the point is that it's genuinely frustrating at that age, and that's why the "Dad joke" elicits a groan: the punchline is funny to him, but to you it just means you wasted your time and will now be disappointed.
Really, this is usually a better outcome than the flat "no" you were going to get anyway, since you were asking for a $500 game console that Dad can't afford. But either way, it sucks to have your genuine attempt at dialogue turned into a weak joke and discarded, and far more so when you're an adult who was actually trying to accomplish something meaningful.
