I told my dentist I had a sweet tooth.

This classic dentist gag gets its laugh from some clever wordplay. When a patient uses the common expression for a love of sugar, the dentist sidesteps the figurative meaning entirely. Instead of hearing about a craving, he hears a literal diagnosis. The humor lies in his deadpan interpretation, creating a silly mental image of a tooth actually made of candy that is, of course, rotting away from its own sweetness.

The joke lands so well because it taps into a universal truth: the eternal battle between our love for treats and our fear of the dental drill. The expression itself has been around since the 1300s, originally meaning a general appetite for delicacies. Over time, it became almost exclusively linked with sugar, turning it into the perfect setup for a joke about the inevitable consequences we all face in the exam chair.

The punchline paints the dentist as either a master of dry wit or someone so focused on decay that he can only think in clinical terms. Either way, it’s a perfect, groan-worthy pun that gets right to the root of the problem.