Before we begin, we want to make it perfectly clear that we have nothing against your mother. We've never met the woman, but she sounds like an upstanding person and a nurturing, wonderful parent. All of the jokes you're about to read are most definitely not about your beloved mom, who is beyond reproach and the best human being who ever existed. To be honest, we're not even sure why we're publishing all of these yo mama jokes. If you ask us, they're kind of old, cheap, and overused.
Sorry, sorry, that was too easy. But that's what happens when the topic of yo mama jokes comes up. You feel strangely compelled to say things that no mature adult would ever say out loud about another person's mother. What kind of monster would do such a thing?
First, you have knock-knock jokes and then you have the always-worth-a-groan selection of dad jokes. Following that, you hit adolescence and discover insult humor. The wonderful world that is filled with innuendo and rudeness.
When throwing around yo momma jokes there is so much room for you to experiment with different insults. The great thing is that unlike roasts, which need to be based in reality, yo mama jokes have no truth requirement.
While they may not seem it, yo mama jokes are best saved for close friends. They are a game of one-upmanship between cohorts. They are a slow decline into depravity, which is why they are so popular among the ranks of risque-loving young adolescents.
You need to be a little careful when you break out the yo mama jokes. They are an acquired taste and it is very easy to either offend or simply make a fool of yourself should you pick the wrong audience.
Some might say that yo mama jokes are cheap humor, but to many young adults (and even well-humored moms), they are comedy gold. They are where many funny people start experimenting with timing and delivery.
Although the phrase has a long history of including a description portion, such as the old "your mother wears combat boots", the phrase "yo mama" by itself, without any qualifiers, has become commonly used as an all-purpose insult[3] or an expression of defiance.
Movies have seen the incorporation of "Yo Mama" jokes, utilized as punchlines or comedic dialogues between characters. For instance, in the movie White Men Can't Jump, characters exchange "Yo Mama" jokes. Other movies like The Nutty Professor (1996) have featured "Yo Mama" jokes as part of the comedic interaction between characters.[8] Comedian Richard Pryor also incorporated "Yo Mama" jokes in some of his stand-up routines, contributing to the jokes' popularity.[9]
Everyone's heard a "Yo Mama" joke by now, or even cracked one themselves. After all, these jokes were popular since the '90s -- but did you know they've been around for much longer than that? In fact, "Yo Mama" jokes date all the way back to before the Common Era.
The first-known "Yo Mama" joke occurred in 3500 BCE. According to The Huffington Post, researchers in Babylon found a tablet that featured a few fairly inappropriate jokes revolving around beer, death and mothers. Since the tablet is so old that it's hard to read, perfectly translating the joke about the mother is difficult, but it says, "...of your mother is by the one who has intercourse with her. What or who is it?"
It's supposed to describe a riddle, but it doesn't exactly make sense to anyone in the modern day. Nevertheless, it does count as the world's first "Yo Mama" joke. Of course, there were more to follow in the centuries after it.
Shakespeare's "Yo Mama" joke might have been the first one published, but "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" was the first movie to feature such a joke. In this 1975 film, a French soldier yelled, "Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!"
Of course, it took a couple more decades for "Yo Mama" jokes to really catch on with the public. In 1993, "In Living Color" became the first-known TV show to mention this type of joke. One episode featured a game called "The Dirty Dozens" that had the same style as "Concentration" and "Jeopardy" combined, but it required contestants to toss out insults about each other's moms.
The skit was so popular that it stuck around for future episodes, with fans of the show starting to quote jokes like "Yo mama's so fat, they had to baptize her at Sea World."
And the rest is history.