The dead dads club: grief and dark humour
By Rachel · Updated 2026-07-22 · 3 min read
The short answer
Dark humour is one of the most common and least talked about parts of grief. Grieving people often make jokes about their own loss that would horrify an outsider, and find deep relief when another griever laughs instead of flinching. Naming yourself a member of the "dead dads club" or the "dead mums club" is a way of finding the others and shrinking, for a second, a thing that is otherwise unbearable. Laughing about it is not a sign you have stopped hurting. It is grief and love finding another exit.
You said the terrible joke before you could stop yourself, and the whole table went quiet.
Everyone did the careful face, the tilt of the head, and you sat there having just made light of the worst thing that ever happened to you, wishing one single person in the room would laugh instead of worry.
The joke only another griever can catch
So many of you have told me about this exact silence, and about the opposite of it: the friend who lost someone too, who hears the awful line and laughs out loud before you've finished it.
That laugh is not disrespect. It is recognition. It says: I know, I have that one too, mine is worse. For a second the loss is a thing two people are holding together and mocking, instead of a thing you carry alone and speak about only in a hush.
Laughing about it is not being over it. It is grief and love finding another door out of the body when the front one is jammed.
The humour tends to be darkest about the exact detail that hurts most. That is not an accident. You are creeping up on the unbearable thing sideways, because sideways is the only way you can get near it without going under.
The club nobody wanted to join
A lot of you have a name for it. The dead dads club. The dead mums club. The worst club in the world, with the highest entry fee and the members you'd give anything to un-meet.
The joke of the club is doing real work. Naming it turns a private catastrophe into a shared category, and a category has other people in it. When you say you're in the club, you are quietly asking who else is, and someone across the room nods, and you have found each other without either of you having to make a speech.
There is a strange comfort in the membership even as you hate that you qualify. These are the people who don't need the backstory. You can be with people who get it and make the joke and nobody flinches, because everyone there paid the same fee.
When the humour worries other people
The people who love you may find it hard. They hear you joke about your dead father and they wonder if you're coping, or not coping, or hiding something.
Sometimes you are hiding something. Dark humour can be a lid, and you're allowed to have a lid. It can also be exactly what it looks like: a real laugh, in real grief, from a person who contains both at once. Both can be true in the same hour, and neither one cancels the loss underneath.
If the jokes are the only way you can touch it, that is worth noticing gently, not policing. Humour is a way in as well as a way past, and some days you will want the way in.
Keep the ones who laugh
You don't owe anyone the somber face they expect from a grieving person. If the gallows joke is how your love comes out sideways, let it.
And keep the people who laugh. The friend who catches the terrible line and lobs a worse one back is not making light of your person. They are sitting in the dark with you, refusing to let you be the only one in there, and that is its own kind of held.
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