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The best of Father’s Day

Father's Day doesn't get the saccharine mainstream-media treatment other holidays receive -- leaving online communities free to tell true tales of fatherhood.

 

Kevin Morris

IRL

Posted on Jun 20, 2011   Updated on Jun 3, 2021, 4:17 am CDT

Father’s Day doesn’t saturate the media like other holidays. There’s no two-month warm-up, no parade of saccharine commercials, and almost no TV specials.

To fill that void, online communities step in. Perhaps why they produce so much good Father’s Day content.

That’s especially true on social news site Reddit, where a number of Father’s Day posts made it to the front page yesterday.

But we wanted to distill things further. Here, we present the very best of the Reddit Father’s Day posts and comments.

1. The Louis C.K. video

Our first interest lay in Redditors’ own stories, but the site’s top-voted Father’s Day post  — a video by comedian Louis C.K. — is just too good to ignore. In the video, the comedian pontificates on what it means to be a father.  “Do you know why your father spends so much time on the toilet?” he says in the video. “Because he’s not sure if he wants to be a father.”

Like a lot of Louis C.K.’s work, it’s equal parts cynical, hilarious, and sentimental.

2. A new father

On the father-oriented section Dadit, redditor zachin2036 put up a simple happy Father’s Day post. But as is often the case on Reddit, the best content came from the comments.

“My wife gave me the bestest present a dad could get,” wrote meccanikal. “My first was born at 2:34 p.m. today”

3. Oops

Some Father’s Days didn’t go so well.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the best of the bad came from Reddit’s Atheism subreddit, where scientifically-inspired passion often gets the atheist-faithful in trouble.

9fingerwonder, for instance, broke the news of his atheism to his religious dad on Father’s Day:

“He just stares back in almost shock,” 9fingerwonder wrote.

Thankfully, the site’s collective wisdom came to the rescue:

“As a father and grandfather,” wrote MarcoVincenzo, “I suggest that you apologize with a fine 30 year-old single malt scotch. It always seems to work for my kids.”

4. Unconditional love

In the gay-and-lesbian subreddit r/LGBT, isakk21 told the story of his “father the pastor:”

“My dad doesn’t know that I know this, but he once told my mom this shortly after I came out, ‘Ya know, I always imagined I was going to marry both of my sons. And I still am.’ I know that a lot of LGBTs out there have some troublesome dads, but there are good ones out there too. My dad is a raging bad ass who’s putting his pastoral credentials on the line to make sure everyone can get married. I love this man. Happy Fathers Day.”

5. Pizza pizza pizza

Finally, on subreddit Random Acts of Pizza, where redditors give one another pizzas, nefariousninja doled out three cheesy pies to three lucky redditors and their fathers.

“This is such an awesome subreddit,” wrote Redditor Unhallowed360. “Gives hope for humanity. Right on man!”

Homepage photo by foreverphoto

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*First Published: Jun 20, 2011, 4:25 am CDT