Is there a better way to honor the Founding Fathers than by telling Fourth of July dad jokes?

Probably. But humor us. It’s Inde-pun-dence Day!

Sure, there are other ways to celebrate July 4. Take fireworks. On the one hand, fireworks are a lot of fun. On the other hand, you might have only two fingers left.

Hence, we recommend sticking with these good, clean and family-friendly dad jokes to mark America’s summer birthday with the kids.

This latest dose of holiday-themed fatherly humor consists of the best (but mostly worst) dad jokes, riddles and puns related to July Fourth, the American Revolution, fireworks, flags and Paul Revere’s pets. If you don’t like them, blame the Internet pages where we found them.

By the way, history failed to record who told the first dad joke in the United States, but we’d put a dollar on George Washington. After all, he is the Father of Our Country.

So now listen, my children, and you shall hear of the …

Best (worst) general Fourth of July dad jokes

Q. Why aren’t there any Fourth of July knock-knock jokes?
A. Because freedom rings.

Q. How did the unexpected guest greet his grilling host at the July 4 barbeque?
A. “Fancy meat-ing you here.”

Q. Which flag has the highest Yelp rating?
A. The U.S. flag. It has 50 stars!

Q. What should people never eat on July 4th?
A. Fire crackers.

Q. Why does the Statue of Liberty stand in New York Harbor?
A. Because she can’t sit down.

+ + +

My wife wanted to skip the big BBQ party in order to watch the July 4 parade instead. I told her that would be a big missed-steak.

+ + +

Q. What do Santa Claus and a flag have in common?
A. They both hang out at a pole.

Q. What did one flag say to the other flag?
A. Nothing. It just waved.

Q. What did Polly The Parrot want for the Fourth of July?
A. A firecracker.

Q. What do you call a snowman on the Fourth of July?
A. A puddle.

Q. What do the American flag and a sad candy cane have in common?
A. They’re both red, white and blue.

Q. What’s a firecracker’s favorite summer treat?
A. Pop-sicles

Q. Why don’t firefighters get the Fourth of July off?
A. Because fire works.

Best (worst) patriotic/Revolutionary War humor

Q. What was the favorite food of General Washington’s army during the Revolutionary War?
A. Chicken Catch-a-Tory.

Q. What was all the rage at the Colonists’ Cotillion of 1776?
A. Doing the Indepen-dance.

Q. Which colonists told the most dad jokes?
A. Punsylvanians!

Q. What do you get when you cross a finely dressed, patriotic American with a curly-haired dog?
A. A Yankee Poodle Dandy.

Q. Was the Declaration of Independence signed in Philadelphia?
A. No, it was signed in ink.

Q. Seriously, where was the Declaration of Independence signed?
A. On the bottom!

Q. What’s the name of the cat who famously yelled, “The British are coming! The British are coming!”?
A. Paw Revere.

Q. Did you hear the one about the Liberty Bell?
A. Yeah, it cracked me up!

Q. What ghost haunted King George III?
A. The Spirit of ’76!

Q. What did King George III think of the colonists?
A. He thought they were revolting.

Q. Why are early Americans like ants?
A. Because they lived in colonies.

Q. What do you call an American Revolutionary War cartoonist?
A. A Yankee Doodler

Q. What’s the difference between a duck and George Washington?
A. One has a bill on his face, and the other has his face on a bill.

Q. Where did George Washington keep his armies?
A. In his sleevies.

Fourth of July dad jokes dog photo: © Javier brosch /Adobe Stock.

As our American holidays continue the slow decline into commercial bliss, I try to take the time to consider the message I am conveying to my children.

The Fourth of July is a celebration of a free nation, a place where ideas can be challenged freely and change can be implemented. Does it work perfectly? Of course not, it’s something I constantly take for granted and I want to remind myself why it’s important, so I can pass it along to my children.

Here are five messages you should reinforces with your child this Fourth of July:

1. Be thankful for what you have

Kids don’t know how good they’ve got it. When I was growing up I had to beg to get call waiting and chose poorly in my BETA/VHS gamble. It can always be worse, ask the people who lived through the Great Depression. Be thankful.

2. Nobody is perfect

My son came home from school one day and told me his teacher had said the President was a mean man. I said, “Son, the President has a hard job, I’m glad I don’t have to decide the things he does. The people who run this country are always going to make mistakes. It’s always been that way and always will be. The best thing you can do is figure out how you can make it better. A lot of people talk about the way things should be, but the important ones do something about it.”

3. Freedom isn’t free

The reason we have candy-soaked parades and get to play with explosive items past our bedtime is because many men and women have fought, and some even died, for us to keep us safe. Thousand continue to do so today. They are forced to make decisions we would never even have to consider. Tell a soldier how much you appreciate them today.

4. History keeping repeating

For every young whippersnapper who is making things “worse,” you will find an old coot who can’t stand how things are these days. We cannot change the past with the future, but we can use it to make a better one.

5. Pay it forward

Children are an endless stream of wants and needs who find it inconvenient when the world does not bend to their will. Whenever my son takes out a library book, he never wants to return it. “If you kept all of the books, there would be no library,” I have told him. “Someone built that library, so everyone could learn something. Whatever you take from it, you need to give back.”  Should a country receive anything less from its citizens?

At some point, the American Dream changed from something a person worked to earn to a right that was given and deserved. We get the privilege of living in a country where we can speak our minds and know our rights. Our forefathers worked together, despite their differences, to build something worthwhile to pass on to their children. Parents have a responsibility to teach their children how to acknowledge the past, live in the present, and prepare a future for the generations to come. Every child who understands that this Fourth of July is one more person to keep the real American Dream alive.

Photo: Jason Leung on Unsplash

My mother made plans. At 5 p.m., the family would gather at our house for a barbecue. Lovely. After all, it was July Fourth and barbecuing is one of those Independence Day things to do along with seeing fireworks, having picnics, watching baseball, etc.

But there was a problem. We didn’t have a grill.

Well, not exactly. We had the unopened box from Sears with all the parts of a grill.

All we had to do was put it together. My father and I, that is.

My father had a number of good qualities he passed down to me and we shared – a love of sports, a sense of humor, an appreciation for ice cream, etc. But handy, he was not.

He loved model planes and trains and bliss for him included putting together one and painting it (while eating some ice cream as noted above). Yet putting together anything bigger than a model … well, that wasn’t a strength of his. To put it mildly.

And I inherited this trait, too.

For my father, it was always about the proper tools. He’d search our garage which had more junk than Fred Sandford’s lot. I’m not so sure my father wanted to find the tool he was looking for. If he didn’t find the tool, he could blame the construction issues on not having the proper one.

Maybe, the tool was somewhere in that mess of a garage, but it wouldn’t appear again until it was unneeded.

Anyway, we got outside early and took out all the parts for the grill. We separated and stacked them neatly. Then, we looked at the instructions – there must have been 87 steps. To clarify, it’s not like we were building some ornate fire pit. It was probably a glorified hibachi. However, it was electric – hence the complications.

After a sigh and a silent “oh, crap,” we proceeded. We had seven hours to figure this out.

As the day dragged on, we made halting progress. There were meltdowns, questioning if the barbecue looked like the picture, panic attacks, and consideration of ordering pizza. More than a few times, we questioned what my mother was thinking.

At around 3 o’clock, the barbecue looked pretty much like the picture, and we only had a few missing parts. We, in our mechanical wisdom, deemed them unnecessary.

There was one final step. We had to make sure the grill would light. The grill was supposed to light with a simple turn of a knob. However, something went wrong (could blame the manufacturer?) and my father and I determined we would light a match, throw it in, and turn the knob at the same time.

Before making sure the grill would light, we took a break. We had a cold drink and looked at our creation.

“You think it’ll work?”

“I hope so.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“So, whose going to light it?”

After we couldn’t nurse our drinks anymore and with go-time ticking closer, we approached the grill.

My father lit the match and turned the knob. And nothing happened.

He tried again. Nothing happened.

After making a bunch of suggestions and him repeating, “I did that,” we decided to try together.

He would light the match, and I would turn the knob.

I had nightmare visions of creating our own Fourth of July fireworks.

As my father dropped the burning match in, I turned the knob.

And jumped back.

Hey, I prefer pizza.

Anyway, as I jumped back, I smacked into my father who had also taken a few steps back.

My father and I looked on together as the flame caught the fuel and the fire caught. We had put together a working grill. Now, it didn’t look exactly right and it made some odd noises, but that night the family barbecued and everyone was happy.

We did it. My father and I saved Independence Day. And we survived to tell the tale when we later went to see the real fireworks.

A version of this first appeared on Me, Myself and Kids. Photo Danny Gallegos on Unsplash

AMERICA, July 5 — Today, tired and sunburnt, we share our national walk of shame, showing up to work with freedom on our lips and barbecue on our collars. Our collective voices are hoarse from loud laughter and big ideas. However, today is reality, where passion lives among the stoic, and retweets are once again our currency. Everywhere is apple pie in plastic wrap.

Yesterday was all parades and fireworks: The kids running wild through the stereotypes, us with amber waves of grain alcohol. Together, we shared our collective greatness, making every lawn a soapbox where we proudly wore our patriotic T-shirts from Old Navy (thank one Nation under God, they still fit from last year). For a moment America actually felt great again, and that felt great.

But today the ceasefire is over. We return to the bipartisan trenches as dictated by the rules we all agreed to in the latest operating system update.

The truth is, July 5, 1776, wasn’t that much different from today. Granted, there was far less Lee Greenwood but the confusion, obstacles, division and hardship? That was a thing, even if nobody posted it on Facebook.

While the signing of the Declaration of Independence is considered the birth of a nation, the news was not available in real-time to the masses. It took months for word to reach the far corners of the country. Meanwhile, the British were not going to let a piece of autographed paper trigger a reverse Brexit, no matter how much they all loved Hamilton.

It was a long, hard year, and yet America persisted.

We are still persisting.

These are the conversations I have with my boys, faced as they are with the never-ending onslaught of bad news that is anything but fake. I try to use history to show them that our country has been in conflict before and such times, these times, impossible though they may seem, often make the great things possible. It wasn’t always a musical.

Which is to say that I want my boys to fight. Not in some foreign war for oil and ego, but in the battles being waged here, every single moment. Why? Because they are white boys who will one day be white men, and it would be far too easy to sit back and let privilege guide them by the blinders. Far too easy.

Easy is not an option.

It’s time to get your hands dirty, boys.

Yesterday was a day to celebrate America: celebrate not its perfection, but rather its promise. And promise, after all, is a thing worth celebrating.

Today, however, is about fulfilling that promise, the fight for a better tomorrow and every day that follows. Today is one more chance to step in the right direction, toward purple mountains and everything.

What stars shine and fade and shine again in the sky; warming upturned faces with the glow of patriotism writ loud upon a black canvas?

Why, those would be fireworks.

I fucking hate fireworks.

I didn’t always. Then the kids came, and we moved and I found myself penned in by seasonally jingoistic merrymakers. Packed into a neighborhood where the houses are separated by long, thin driveways, real estate law and little else. Neighbors’ voices come unbidden, crashing through screens in windows open to the summer, and alerting us to their favorite jam or who, exactly, needs to “fuck off.”

Imagine then the sound of low-budget fireworks, placed in the street in front of your house, the fuse hurriedly lit before a car can come and ruin it all. Greenish glows and pops like gunshots well past bedtime alerting everyone that it is fucking America’s birthday, y’all.

Fireworks: For the drunken and soon-to-be fingerless

I don’t begrudge the patriotic their due on the Fourth itself. It warms even my cynical heart to look out upon the drunken and soon-to-be fingerless as they light their fuses and think to myself, “Happy Birthday, you ol’ battle axe.”

Once upon a time, I would even brave the throng, 300,000 people strong, to see Boston light its own offering to the gods of war and sovereignty, happy to be squashed against my fellow Americans as the Pops played on.

It’s really the celebrations on the 3rd and the 5th and the 6th and sometimes right up through the 20th that the display of “America, Fuck Yeah” begins to wear Keira Knightley thin.

I’m sure next year we’ll find a place to go and see some real fireworks. The kids will be delighted as lemon yellow and freeze-pop blue flowers of fire bloom 200 feet high and the petals fall and fade, slow and soft and reflected in small shining eyes. And that’s the moment when I will learn to embrace the fervor of my neighbors.

When, on a warm, still August night I will hear the battle cry, “Dude! Don’t shoot that fahckin’ bottle rocket at my fahckin car!” and I will softly chuckle to myself and whisper, “Happy belated birthday, you Grand Old Bitch.”

Because that is America, too.

Photo by Nicolas Tissot on Unsplash