Everyone loves a good dad joke

... now, if only there were some good dad jokes!

The ICanHazDadJoke site claims to maintain the internet's largest collection of dad jokes. GitHub user CrossNox has made a nice wrapper around their API. Together, this lets you retrieve a random dad joke programmatically.

Why, you ask, would you want to get a dad joke programmatically? You could include it in your web site or app, showing random dad jokes to delight your users. You could write a simple script to retrieve and show you the joke from the command line. You could even prank someone and have their computer speak a dad joke every day.

You'll need the library. A simple pip install dadjokes will take care of that.

Then, you'll need this simple script:

from dadjokes import Dadjoke
dadjoke = Dadjoke()
print(dadjoke.joke)

Whenever you need a laugh, from the directory where you saved that script, run python dadjoke.py

Some simple enhancements (for *nix systems)

You can make this file executable, so you can run it with having to put the python part on the command. First, let's find out where your python executable is located. Enter which python3 and note the path that is output. Next, edit your script. As the very first line, you'll add a "hashbang" that points to your python executable. Like this:

#!/path/to/your/python

from dadjokes import Dadjoke
dadjoke = Dadjoke()
print(dadjoke.joke)

Once you've saved your changes, you can mark the file as executable with chmod +x dadjoke.py From now on, you can type ./dadjoke.py to run the script. Wow, that saved you from typing like 5 whole characters!

For you Mac users, you can use the built-in say program and have your system speak the dad joke. Enter ./dadjoke.py | say (If you can believe it, the jokes are even less funny when spoken by the monotone computerized voice.)

It would be unprofessional of me to suggest you sneak over to a coworkers computer when they leave it unlocked, and set up a cron job to have a dad joke spoken to them throughout the day. So, I won't suggest that.