Ah, good old “yo mama” jokes. They really are the gold standard for childhood insults, aren’t they? It makes you wonder: People have had mothers for a very long time now; surely the idea of making jokes about them isn’t new.
After all, history has proven that humor hasn’t evolved as much as we’d like to think it has. And we’ve already established that the world’s oldest joke was, in fact, a fart joke (you can read more about that right here). So what about the beloved “yo mama” joke? How far back can we trace one of those?
Well, for starters, we have to take into consideration that “yo mama” is a pretty modern way of phrasing things and include other variations, like “your mother,” in our search. According to some sources, the oldest known joke about one’s mother dates to about 1500 BCE. The joke is attributed to a Babylonian student, who inscribed it on a tablet that was discovered in Iraq in 1976. Here’s what survives of it: “…of your mother is by the one who has intercourse with her. What/who is it?”
People Have Been Making “Yo Mama” Jokes for Thousands of Years
Other historical figures were quoted as using “your mother”-style insults in their personal lives, but it’d be interesting to know when the trend was popularized. There have to be examples of it in early literature, no? As it turns out, a lot of people actually point to William Shakespeare as being a pioneer of “your mother” jokes.
In The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, written in the late 1500s, a character named Aaron confronts the sons of his secret lover, Tamora. When one of them suggests that Aaron has “undone” their mother (meaning brought down), he responds by saying, “Villain, I have done thy mother.”
Shakespeare must’ve liked the way “thy mother” sounded, because he used the phrase in another one of his plays years later. The Life of Tymon of Athens, first published in 1623, features a scene in which the misanthropic philosopher Apemantus insults a painter by calling him a “filthy piece of work.” “You’re a dog,” the painter fires back. Not to be outdone, Apemantus shuts him down with this little zinger: “Thy mother’s of my generation. What’s she, if I be a dog?”
In summation, Shakespeare might not have been the first person to make such a joke, but he could possibly be the first well-known writer to incorporate one of them into his work. So…thanks, we guess?
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