Sunday morning, I just finished getting dressed for church. I came downstairs, logged onto my computer to check out the latest news and most current tweets on Twitter. As I took a seat with at the table my laptop was at, The Boy approaches. With a devilish grin (right before church, mind you! Has he no shame?) he says:
“Yo’ mama so fat, when she got hit by a bus she said, ‘Who threw that rock at me?’”
WHAAAAAT? Is The Boy talkin’ about my mama? His grandma? Then it instantly hit me. The Boy was trying to “play the dozen”, “rank on me”, or in more recent terminology, he was “cracking” on me. All of these are methods of indirect criticism through the use of humor. Turns out he heard this at school and thought it was extremely funny.
We use to spend countless hours on the schoolbus cracking or on each other and our mothers. For whatever reason, cracking on someone’s father was never as entertaining, thus it was not used much. ”Yo’ Mama” jokes could be clean or just outright vulgar (I’ll let you, dear reader, fill in the blanks), but to talk about someone’s mama…Ooooooh WEEEE! That brought many of us close to fisticuffs, particularly if you were losing the battle.
Why did my son make this mistake? Obviously he did not know that his old man used to be one of the best “Yo’ Mama” joke tellers on the school bus. I hate to admit, but I begin to surgically dissect my own flesh and blood by talking about his mama (to my dear sweet wife-sorry, honey. I didn’t mean a word of what I’m about to say):
“Yo’ mama so ugly, when she was born the doctor slapped the wrong end. On purpose.”
“Yo’ mama so ugly, she makes E.T. look like a supermodel.”
“Yo’ mama so fat, when she puts on a yellow rain slicker, people stop and yell, ‘Taxi!’”
“Yo’ mama so skinny, she can hula hoop with a Cheerio.”
“Yo’ mama so fat, when God said let there be light, he told yo’ mama to move out of the way.”
“Yo’ mama so dumb, she hear its’s chilly outside, so she goes in and gets a bowl.”
“Yo’ mama so dumb, she tried to put M&M’s in alphabetical order”…
And on. And on. And so on.
My son was in utter awe of his dad’s coolness. My wife and daughter walked into the room during the middle of my “Yo’ Mamathon”. My daughter hit the floor in laughter and asked me to repeat some of them. My wife gave me a “why are you encouraging them?” look which made the whole thing funnier to me.
This continued on as we rode in my truck to church, and looking up newer, funnier Mama jokes on my Google phone after church.
My parental sense kicked in as we pulled into our driveway a little later that day. I told The Boy to never start the “Yo’ Mama” game, but if someone else targets him then he needs to blast them with his newly acquired arsenal of wrecking ball witicisms. With decisive authority.
After all, that’s the only way to tell a good “Yo’ Mama” joke. You gotta make the other side regret ever sayin’ anything about “Yo’ Mama”.
Mr. Man
P.S. I found some “Yo’ Daddy” jokes on the Internet. They were pretty foul (don’t go looking them up, dear reader).
