We Read These Funny Dad Texts and Now Our Family Group Chat Makes Perfect Sense

The thumbs-up reaction to a complex emotional question is the foundational dad-text move and we should give it the respect it deserves. You write, “Dad, I’m worried about my career, I don’t know if I should take the new job or stay where I am, what do you think?” Dad replies with a single thumbs up. The conversation is over. The wisdom has been transmitted. These hilarious dad texts and dad text fails are operating in a communication style that millennials simply did not anticipate, where the response is always shorter than the question and somehow still adequate.

The Reese’s Puffs cereal references in this gallery deserve a paragraph all their own. Multiple texts. Multiple family members. The cereal is, somehow, the dominant subject of an entire family group chat over multiple days. Dad has priorities and the priorities are sugar-coated. The funny family group texts that emerge from this kind of single-issue obsession are essentially documenting the moment a household discovers what their dad actually cares about, and the answer is breakfast cereal.

The boar explosion sticker in response to “your car is on fire” is the kind of dad text that I will never recover from. The car is on fire. The driveway is on fire. The situation is escalating. Dad’s response is a sticker. Not a phone call. Not a fire department dispatch. A boar with explosion graphics. The dad humor texts in this gallery are at their absolute peak when the gravity of the situation and the lightness of the response are this dramatically mismatched. The boar is, somehow, exactly the right answer.

And the obituary photo selection. A dad has casually sent his preferred obituary photo. The photo is a black-and-white cowboy hat shot. He is smiling. He is committed. He has thought about this. The photo is, by any measure, an excellent choice. The fact that he sent it unprompted, in a regular Tuesday text, is the entire energy of dadhood. Dad is, in this moment, way more on top of his eventual death than I am.

What this whole gallery captures, when you sit back and look at it, is that dads have figured out something the rest of us are still learning, which is that texting does not require performance. Dad is not crafting his messages. Dad is not trying to be charming. Dad is, in most cases, communicating exactly the amount he wants to communicate and absolutely no more. The thumbs up is not laziness. The thumbs up is precision. The thumbs up has decided, after consideration, that no further information is required.

There’s also a generational thing happening here that’s quietly tender. Our dads grew up with phones attached to walls, and now they’re being asked to navigate a continuous, asynchronous, emoji-heavy communication environment that genuinely was not built for them. They’re doing their best. The boar sticker is their best. The obituary photo, in its own way, is their best. The Reese’s Puffs corner of the group chat is their best. We laugh because we love them, and because the gap between how we use the technology and how they use it is constantly producing comedic content for us.

The other thing I’d offer is that these texts work because they reveal, in tiny ways, who our dads actually are. The man who sees a small dog in pants and decides his son needs to know about it. The man who pre-selects his obituary photo and shares it casually. The man who answers everything with “I’m working.” These are not generic dad behaviors. These are specific people, with specific personalities, who happen to be our dads, and the texts are how they reveal themselves to us, one weird message at a time.