Anil Dash Overanalyzes Election-Themed Yo Momma Fights on Twitter
While this is all in good fun, what's startling to me is that none of the jokes I've seen mention, or even allude to, race. Playing the dozens is a uniquely and explicitly African American tradition, and we obviously have an African American candidate favored in the race for the first time ever, and yet it hasn't come up.Yo Mama's So Fat... (dashes.com). You really should read all the way to the last graf in his post. I'm not gonna blog any spoilers here.Some of this, of course, is selection bias due to the audience that Twitter reaches. (At least so far.) But as these jokes from last night are already making their way around online as email forwards and apparently getting quoted in offices across the country, it seems to me like the playfulness of the language and the absurdity of the medium may have masked something timely and fitting. This obviously and instrinsically black tradition has been adopted by a community like Twitter that is, frankly, disproportionately not black. You could see it as the deracination of the tradition, or even worse as a deliberate omission of cultural context in its appropriation. But I actually see it as something positive.
A running joke on Twitter is all in good fun, but I find the unselfconsciousness of this little political gag to be a comforting reflection of the way that the larger trend around this election is moving as well. Like Barack Obama, playing the dozens is obviously black but we're able to just include that implicitly in our participation without having denying or diminish it. That feels like progress.
Smart and insightful, and one of a million reasons I love Anil Dash. Even if his momma's a ho.
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I would like to point out that my people have a related practice called Reading Beads, as in "Don't make me read your beads, Miss Thing!" Although the barbs are aimed at the object rather than the object's mother, the practice is commonly believed to have derived from The Dozens. How's that for hyperanalysis?
That is awesome, and I was not previously aware of such a practice among the Tribes of Dorothy.
I remember that I many years ago I had a book of National Lampoon's White Bread Snaps. My favorite (paraphrased):
When Paul Revere said the British were coming, he meant in your Great-Great-Great-Grandmother's mouth.
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I resent this. I included Africa in my jokes, thusly:
Yo mama so fat and nasty, she could feed an entire African nation with the crumbs in her mustache.
What really requires analysis is how to actually, for the rest of time, spell "mama".
...Seems to me Anil needs to remove that ten-foot corncob from his ass before it metastasizes to his colon. Otherwise, it's going to only get harder to knock him off that high horse because he'll be permanently stuck to the saddle.
Am I the only one that sees nothing but a big grey sheet of nothing when I go to any page on dashes.com? must be one of my FF plugins wreaking havoc with whatever Anil has on his site.
Xeni, thanks for the link! OM, I am delighted by the incoherence of your corn cob/high horse/saddle/cancer-reference analogy!
Adamus, the "grey sheet" thing was a typo I made in my site's HTML. Should be fixed!
While I have not yet had the time to read the full article, my analysis of the form seems to suggest that including race in such an insult would be unoriginal and bad form. Not because of the racism angle per se, but because the affront is meant to be specifically personal.
Including a loosely-defined group that bear perhaps only superficial similarities to the object of derision would not only be sloppy, but has the inherent weakness of being totally inapplicable to persons of other loosely-defined groups to whom those tropes would scarcely apply. Originality is favored over stereotype, and once the put-down has been properly formulated, has the advantage of being applied to any single member of the human race whose maternal predecessor deserves a vexing verbal indignity.
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Your proximal ancestress is doltish enough to believe the supposition that a thesaurus is a specimen of terrible lizard. Ha! Ha ha!
"Yo momma's so black" is a frequent first part of a dozens line.
While this is all in good fun, what's startling to me is that none of the jokes I've seen mention, or even allude to, race.
Because both their mamas are white, duh.
I'd be interested to read both the lolcats and the yo momma post, but I also get a big grayish nothingness. If I refresh the page I sometimes get a glimpse of text... until it disappears.
I suspect it's because I have scripts blocked... but on that note, did you know that script from 7 different sites/sources tries to run when I open the page, and then if I allow those, scripts from another 2 more sites?!
If I have to unblock more than 3 sites, I usually don't bother. Ya'll get off my comp'uer 'fore I call the 'thorities. =P
My friends and I grew up in a predominately white so-cal neighborhood and we used to do this all the time. So I never really considered it a racial thing so much as an adolescent thing. (My adolesence has lasted me well into my 30's so far).
Although we just called them "mom jokes" and more often than not instead of doing "yo momma so fat" type of jokes, we would usually just answer someone's comment or question with a variation of "your mom". Our conversations usually went something like this:
"Hey, what are you doing tonight?"
"Your mom."
"Oh that reminds me, if your mom wants her panties back, I need them until this weekend. I'm going skydiving and I forgot to buy a parachute."
"Ok, well, if your mom wants her lipstick back I've still got some around the base of my johnson."
"That wasn't my mom, that was your dad in drag."
"Oh, I guess my dad was doing your mom then because his crotch stank just like hers."
"Everyone's crotch stinks like your mom's."
"Your mom said I was better in bed than you."
"Ok, could you just get off my mom now?"
"I'll get off your mom if you get off mine."
"I haven't had my turn yet, though, I'm still in line behind the mailman, the paperboy, and the fire departmet."
By that time we usually got kicked out of the library.
Well, is it progress that now white people listen to gangsta rap? Maybe, but what's the attitude behind it? I think a lot of white folks (especially young people interested in being cool) have a kind of internal conflict where they believe that black culture is hip and cool, but they also see it as low brow and unfitting for their class. While it's entertaining, it's certainly not a culture they can or want to be a part of.
Therefore, white culture develops techniques for "safely" enjoying black culture. The classic is the "elvis" technique, where black cultural elements are integrated into white cultural expression. Another way that I've noticed, though, is the tongue-in-cheek appreciation. White people saying things like "keep it real, dawg" and "represent, nigga!" are considered lame if they're speaking genuinely (the way a black inner city kid might). However, the same language used in a sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek way is acceptable, and often considered funny or clever among whites, because it evokes the coolness of black culture while simultaneously affirming their distance from it.
To me, this reflects an uncomfortable attitude - it seems to be saying "Look, I'm cool enough to know the latest black slang, but don't be confused - I'm not 'ghetto' or anything. I just think it's funny."
Not that I don't think the yo mamma fight was hilarious. But I can see how people might see an undertone of hipster sarcasm there.