Being the most universally recognized and used type of humor, “Yo mama” jokes have been around for quite a while. Shakespeare liked to use it in his plays, and there are traces of it even in the Bible. Of course, not in the widely used shape as we all know it today, but rather as witty observations regarding someone’s mother. Why and how they started, probably nobody knows. But there are certain psychological explanations that we can turn to explain this phenomenon.
Whenever someone’s having a quarrel they can’t get out of, the easiest way to leave it feeling victorious is to end it by insulting the other party. And the easiest way to do that? Your mama jokes that you know will hurt them. You’ve probably had a chance to notice this kind of behavior as a kid, when this was usually how your schoolmates would end it. First one of them starts insulting the other one’s mother, then he says something even more offensive and so on. This happens because the easiest way to hurt somebody is to invent a lie and degrade them.
There’s even more to “yo momma” jokes than that. People are interesting creatures indeed, and sometimes, they subconsciously recognize certain personal traits in someone else. By denying these characteristics as part of their own nature and implying them on others, they’ll feel better, and they do this without even being aware of it: their personal anxieties and physical attributes they’re sensitive about become somebody else’s. That’s how one’s sensitivity towards being overweight becomes a “Yo mama so fat” joke about the opponent’s mother. Why face it when you can ignore it?
Well, maternal insults in the form of your momma jokes are probably the most hurtful type of humor. Due to this, they are likely to trigger a violent reaction towards the originator of the joke. They are usually based on obesity (the mother being so fat the Earth orbits around her), incest, age, poverty, and commonly promiscuity. Your stereotypical mother is always exaggeratedly fat, she’s not really the smartest person in the world, and she lacks basic hygienic skills. The funny thing is, the originator of the joke doesn’t actually know their fellow interlocutor’s mother (at least most of the times). This woman is a product of their imagination and everything about her is hyperbolical. These jokes today are most commonly used among young people, especially male African-Americans the youth culture consists of. It’s all part of a way of expression and slang, and that’s how the subject of the joke is “mama”, “momma” or “ma” in different places.
You can actually find funny yo mama jokes, in one form or the other, in every language and culture. The Greeks use allusions of incestuous nature, the Spanish curse one’s “madre”, even the peaceful Chinese nation have varieties of their own. That’s how they justify their classification as “globally recognized” jokes!
With no intensions to insult or refer to anyone’s mother, we filled up this section with the best yo mama jokes with the sole purpose of making you laugh. They’re clean (read child-safe) and easy to remember, great for telling at parties. Hopefully you just won’t find yourself in a situation where you’ll have to use one of them as a comeback.
