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Yo Momma jokes: a reprisal
04/20/06
by Clay

Just about every fight I can remember from elementary school involved someone saying something about someone's momma. It was the germ warfare of its elemetary school heyday. Two guys (or girls, they had mamas too) would begin the delicate dance of insult with a buckteeth or big forehead joke and sometimes, if it got heated, end up on the momma turf.

   
Buck teeth and big foreheads were often the opening salvos.

After a mama joke was uttered there would be a subtle intake of breath. Non-verbal combatants would take a step back and nod, mouth agape, to confirm that the momma line had, in fact, been crossed. Then one of two things happened, a momma-war ensued or there was an actual fight. There was no middle ground. I don't know if I've ever heard a more universally accepted statement than, "He was talking about my momma," to justify fighting. I don't want to get carried away, but in Nashville, from the years 1989-1992, you could legally kill someone who talked about your momma and not even be punished.

"Go ahead and make your petty joke, then you will die."

It was cray how the momma talk would turn an otherwise mild-mannered, sane and rational man into an absolute killing machine. I heard in the First Gulf War, they just played momma jokes over and over again to keep the soldiers advancing over the sand dunes. Word is that the Panama invasion ensued after Manuel Noriega said that President Bush's, "Momma was so fat, when her beeper goes off, people thought she was backing up."

From his prison cell, Noriega ruefully contemplates whether he should have gone with, "Yo Momma so fat she had to iron her pants in the driveway."

I remember once in fifth grade music class, we were all holding hands singing, We Shall Overcome, and my friend Aalon got into a fight...with a girl...who had somehow worked a momma joke in between verses of the song.

Somewhere amid these words, a yo momma joke.

I still don't know how the fight happened. Only that back in fifth grade there was no real stigma associated with fighting girls. In fact, it's underdiscussed how much bigger girls were than boys in the fifth grade. I remember the girl he got into a fight with looked like the Predator, and was as big as the Predator too. She didn't even need to use but four of her arms to beat him up. And everyone felt sorry for him. If that had happened four years later, he might still be in jail.

Aalon's female combatant.

But then the movie White Men Can't Jump arrived and momma jokes slowly died. Pretty soon, you could degrade someone's mom with absolute impunity. I still blame Woody Harrelson.

You smug bastard, look what you did.

I've said all this for one reason, momma jokes are back. And I'm still stunned. That's because Wilmer Valderrama has brought them back to MTV. Seriously. Wilmer Valderrama.

This caught me completely by surprise. I was sitting down to eat eight-day old pizza when I heard a lispy Hispanic accent and saw some guy wearing biker gloves in the center of the screen. I thought maybe I had accidentally ended up on one of those telenovellas. But pretty soon there were legitimate yo momma jokes being tossed around. This through me for an absolute loop. How had no one told me about this show and was Valderrama also recreating his youth or did momma jokes just now cross over the border in Juarez, Mexico? Better yet, how in the world are there still so many practitioners of yo momma jokes still alive? Is it an ancient and undying art like the samurai?

Personally, I think the Yo Momma people and the samurai might have been living the same place all these years. Wilmer Valderrama's next show is going to feature ritual hari-kari.

Questions just continued to pour over me. Was it possible that I was the first person to ever see this show? Were they test-marketing it in Nashville because MTV knew about the yo momma murder exception in the city?

So, of course, I watched the dueling yo momma contestants. For over an hour. I was mesmerized. By the time it was over, I was almost convinced that ten years from now there are going to be academic articles being written about how That 70's Show was the Yale Law School of the 1960's, the intellectual incubator of our generation. First Ashton Kutcher created and produced Punk'd and Beauty and the Geek and then Fez takes Lohan's virginity and brings back yo mamma jokes...to television no less.

Wouldn't you give up your life now, if you were told your obituary would begin, "(Insert name here) who rose to prominence as a devirginizer of countless Hollywood starlets including Lindsay Lohan and brought back yo momma jokes from the dustbin of murder-inducing verbiage, died today at the age of (insert age here)." For me, I'd be ready to go at this exact moment.

   
For further example: Clay Travis who rose to prominence as a devirginizer of countless Hollywood starlets including Lindsey Lohan and brought back yo momma jokes from the dustbin of murder-inducing verbiage, died today at the age of twenty-seven." Bang, I'm out.

Right now I'm just hoping for Wilmer Valderrama's sake that he doesn't run into that Predator girl during any Civil Rights musicals. If so, he should know she's cunning and duplicitous when it comes to inserting yo momma jokes between verses. It probably wouldn't matter anyway though, because by that time Mila Kunis, Laura Prepon, and Danny Masterson will all have seats on the Supreme Court and they will have incorporated the yo momma murder shield as the law of the land.

Meet one-third of the 2018 Supreme Court.

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