Manipulating Play Frames: The Yo Momma Joke Cycle on YouTube
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Abstract
Despite their prevalence on school playgrounds, the Internet, and mass media, modern forms of the Dozens have garnered surprisingly little notice from folklorists. This lacuna is particularly unfortunate considering the important role played by folklorists such as Roger Abrahams in bringing this verbal dueling tradition to the attention of the scholarly community. Abrahams’s seminal 1962 study, based on his fieldwork in a Philadelphia ghetto, examined the Dozens as performed in urban African American communities. When “playing the Dozens,” Abrahams tells us, participants direct ritual insults at their opponents’ family, most often their mothers. These insults are often highly stylized, contain sexual or obscene themes, and are sometimes rhymed.
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