Complex Numbers

Your Mama

That's right, I said your mama.

The 'Your Mom' Joke: A Brief History  

Once again, leave it to Cracked to explain the most important aspects of our cultural history.

Today what we’re talking about is the most popular response to literally anything anyone could ever say to you during middle school.

Since I have a good memory only for the stupidest things, here's a joke from my own middle school days.

Two kids are having the old "my dad vs. your dad" argument.

"My dad's better than your dad!"

"Nuh-uh! My dad's better than your dad!"

And so on for a while until one of them stops and goes,

"Well... my mom's better than your mom."

"Can't argue with that," says the other kid. "That's what my dad says."

Wikipedia’s page for it is titled the “Maternal Insult,” a comically dry name for the much hated yet much celebrated “Your Mom” category of joshing.

And the "your mom" thing still makes me chuckle. Not because of the insult itself, of course. And certainly not because I like seeing mothers disrespected. It's one of those things that's only funny in a meta sort of way, like "we're too old to make your mom jokes, and we know we're too old, but we're doing it anyway, and you know we don't mean anything by it."

The oldest maternal insult comes to us from the distant times of 3500 BC, from ancient Babylon. A tablet found by researchers contained the riddle “…Your mom is by the one who has intercourse with her. What or who is it?” While we can’t answer the riddle owing to the fact that our PhD is in comparative chili judging rather than ancient Babylonian culture, we assume the answer is probably the person who wrote it. It’s just the way of the world.

The oldest known maternal insult, that is. As with beer, you know they were making it before anyone wrote it down or, in this case, made wedgie marks on clay about it ("Your mom makes wedgie marks.")

Anyway, I feel like the answer is "anyone."

Next, we have good ol’ Willy Shakes using it in a few of his plays. Perhaps the best comes from act four, scene two of Titus Andronicus, one of the “lesser” tragedies of the bard’s oeuvre:

Demetrius: "Villain, what hast thou done?"

Aaron: "That which thou canst not undo."

Chiron: "Thou hast undone our mother."

Aaron: "Villain, I have done thy mother."

I don't remember that play (or the movie based on it) well enough for context, but it's good to remember that, at the time, Shakespeare was low comedy.

(The article does provide context, but it's not all that important for the point.)

The joke came into its own, of course, on school playgrounds and classrooms in the 1990s.

Wait, whaaaaat?

Look, kid, your generation didn't invent the your mom joke. As you have pointed out in this article, it's as old as history. Nor was it your generation that perfected the art. And hell, it probably wasn't mine, either, but like I said above: we were trading momma insults back when I was in middle school. Unlike the other things we did in middle school, like listening to disco and wearing bell bottom jeans, the mama joke endured.

So why did this format suddenly become popular among schoolchildren in the 90s? Well, we have the sketch show In Living Color to thank.

And you think they didn't steal it from others? Come on.

That sketch is where such classics as “Yo mama so fat, she had to get baptized at SeaWorld” came from.

Oh hell no. We were saying shit like that all the time. "Yo mama so big she got her own area code." That sort of thing. (That particular joke doesn't work as well these days.)

So what’s next in the evolutionary process of this most ancient and venerated of insult humor? We could start insulting people’s fathers, but “Yo daddy’s so stupid…” doesn’t have the same bite to it, not to mention the already weird sexual connotations the 21st century has awarded to the word “daddy.”

Ahem. Get off my lawn again. Not only were they using "daddy" like that in the 70s, there's goddamn jazz music from like the 40s that uses "daddy" for "lover."

Anyway, point is, some jokes are timeless. Until the inevitable robot uprising, anyway, at which point one robot will turn to the other and say, "Yo mama's a human." And they'll get in a fight.