My unfounded theory: As with most miscommunication and conflict, the 'conflict' between 'dad' joke tellers and youthful audience is because the two parties are using the same thing (jokes) for different purposes. To describe people very, very generally: 'Youth' are displaying their social capacity - their humor, their communication ability, their ability to navigate social situations, their ability to play, etc. They…
This sounds quite familiar to my experience with my 3 year old. He tells jokes back to me that are just as absurd and we try to one up each other. Since he’s learned a good deal of vocabulary and matching and opposites, he finds things that unexpectedly clash hilarious knock knock … porcupine who? Porcupine bulldozer - makes no sense why those things belong together and that’s what makes it funny. Then we’ll laugh an…
Apparently when the older of my two brothers was fairly young, he would tell knock-knock jokes where the punchline was always the phrase "smashed into toothpaste". "Knock knock!" "Who's there?" "Elephant?" "Elephant who?" Elephant _smashed into toothpaste_!" My parents weren't sure exactly what he meant by that (maybe he heard about something being "ground into a paste" and assumed that toothpaste was made in the same way?), but it became a family in-joke, and even though he had stopped by the time I was old enough to converse, I'm still just as familiar with the form.
A similar family meme came from my dad playing a basic word game with my older brothers once when I happened to be present as a toddler. My dad would prompt them in the form of "one ", and they were supposed to respond with "two ", like "one sheep...?" "two sheep" or "one ox...?" "two oxen!" Not understanding the pattern, I interjected at one point with one of my own: "one juice, two lava!" To this day, none of us are quite sure what I meant by this (including me!), but it was memorable enough that it's the only part of this game that we remember.