About the Book

Book: The Dada Base

Author: Allen Brokken

Genre: Comedy

This book is a compliation of the most popular one-liners, head scratchers and total groaners shared on social media by Author Allen Brokken.

Awarded the prestigious Cool Dad Everyone Talks About by his own kids these wholesome jokes are sure to be a hit with your family.

Plus this book contains his complete Telling Jokes and Puns for kids class with free digital access to course videos.

Click here to get your copy!

About the Author

Allen Brokken is a teacher at heart, a husband, and a father most of all. He’s a joyful writer by the abundant grace of God. He began writing the Towers of Light series for his own children to help him illustrate the deep truths of the Bible in an engaging and age-appropriate way. He’s dedicated 15 years of his life to volunteer roles in children’s ministry and youth development. Now that his own children are off to college, he’s sharing his life experiences at home school conferences and through his blog and newsletter at his website. You can get sneak peeks of the ongoing adventures of Lauren, Aiden, and Ethan (plus their pets!) and the #dadjokeoftheday on all the major social media platforms.

More from Allen

When you are an author the industry encourages you to “have a social media presence”. As a new author that’s pretty intimidating because the focus is generally on long form writing which is very different than a 140 character tweet. For the first couple of years I tried different things in the hopes of engaging an audience and nothing seemed to gel.

Then my son introduced me to TikTok. He said, Dad sometimes your jokes are actually funny so why don’t you do them on Tik Tok? I was skeptical at first, but I have been known to be pretty PUN-ny at dinner parties so I tried it.

Given that my office has a lot of Star Wars memorabilia from when I was a kid I landed on telling Star Wars jokes at first. I had very little success only getting between 200 and 1000 view. Then one day I told this joke and my Tik Tok took off.

“So my son was on his way to take his drivers test and I handed him my collectable life size Storm Trooper helmet.”

He looked at me and said, “What’s this for?”

I replied,”So you don’t hit anything.”

If you’re not familiar with Star Wars that joke is funny because Storm Troopers notoriously don’t hit their target. Now I’ve broken the cardinal rule of joke telling, jokes that require the audience to do homework are not good jokes. Which is just one of the many rules of joking around that I learned over the past couple of years.

As my joke list increased I found a group of them that did particularly well online and realized the might make a good joke book. However, I also realized there are a lot of joke books for kids and I wanted to do something different with mine. So I decided I should include my class on telling jokes for kids as a part of the book. So in addition to a collection of funny jokes the book provides a workbook for learning how to tell your own jokes and access to my virtual class for kids on telling jokes and puns.

Author Interview

What is the greatest advice you have ever been given about writing?

Writers write. It seems pretty simple, but if you are a writer you will write. The question is are you focused on writing a singular story or are you scattered all over and unable to get that story out. The difference between a novelist and a writer is a novelist can focus on getting a whole story out end to end.

Can you share 5 random facts about this book?

This book is a compilation of the jokes that “scored the best” in social media algorithms over a 2 year period

The illustrator for my book is my son’s fiancé

We learned that YouTube shorts don’t hold a transcript by default so it was a complicated process to pull the jokes word for word from the social media videos

The book includes free access to an online course about writing jokes

The section on Star Wars has the most jokes

What was the inspiration behind it?

As a kid, I loved joke books, so I thought it would be good to share my jokes in a book. Also, it’s the only joke book I know for kids that includes a class on telling jokes.

Can you share something interesting or surprising you learned while researching for the book?

I learned a bunch about joke theory in prepping for the class that’s in the book. One of the more humorous things was that “biological humor” just just a universal human category of things that regardless of your culture can be funny. I always enjoyed “potty humor” as a kids, but I had no idea that, that is actually a universal source of humor for humans.

What was the most challenging part of bringing this book to life? 

We had no end of trouble getting the cover formatted. This was the first book in this format that my team put together without an actual cover artist and the formatting for multiple versions and printers was just super hard to get right given the limited tools we had to work with.

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. Before you go, where can readers keep up with what’s next?

They can join my newsletter at https://www.towersoflight.net/subscribe