Why “your mum” jokes are the best

Babylonian tablet, c1500 BCE

Twelve years old is a teetering time. They stand, in their suddenly stretching bodies and outsized trainers, on the precipice of new physicality, novel language, fresh independence. There’s a terrible, tender jeopardy in it. You want to will them over the edge, yet also to clasp them close. They push and pull you right back. You face each other, on this cliff-edge. Eyes wide. Astonished. Addicted.

The screenwriter Scott Frank once summed up the experience of living with a pre-teen in five short words: “Fuck you, tuck me in.” For me, it is neatly encapsulated in just two: your mum. I hear them, lobbed back and forth across basketball courts, outside school gates, in local parks. “This game’s so slow.” “Your mum’s slow.” “My phone’s old.” “Your mum’s so old, the alarm goes off when she leaves a museum.” My name, flung like so many missiles. Yet any second now, I will round the corner with snacks and there will be a chorus of “Yes please, oh thank you, thanks very much”. 

Pre-teen boys are neither the first nor the only group to tell jokes that revolve around this two-word sting. The earliest known example was carved into a Babylonian tablet, dating from around 1500 BCE (see above). Others point to the Bible, specifically 2 Kings 9:22 (“And when Joram saw Jehu, he said, ‘Is it peace, Jehu?’ He answered, ‘What peace can there be, so long as the whorings and the sorceries of your mother Jezebel are so many?’”). In fact, much of Genesis could be condensed into the form: “Your mum ate the apple.” 

Shakespeare squeezed one into the otherwise not-very-comic Titus Andronicus (“Thou hast undone our mother.” “Villain, I have done thy mother.”).

They pop up in Mandarin (“Your mother is a big turtle”) and French (“Your mum’s so small her head smells of feet.”). But they have, and always have had, a particular piquance in the playground. Why? I asked Mark Watson, a comedian and author who also has a son about this age. “Maybe it’s to do with the fact that you have so little agency at that stage of life,” he suggests. “Your mum still has to pick you up from parties, you don’t want to be seen at the school gates with her… Perhaps a ‘your mum’ joke is your first gesture towards independence from everything that parents represent.” 

There’s something murkier, though, powering them beneath the surface of our consciousness. “Outside of that joke form, mums are still sort of untouchable at that age,” says Watson. “You still have that pretty powerful instinct towards respect. In the actual presence of someone’s mum, you’d be super polite. You’d never dream of bringing up her real flaws, if she has any.” Transgressing unwritten rules is often what makes jokes thrilling when you start experimenting with comedy, he explains. But it’s a slippery fish. “If you hear a joke that turns a social norm on its head in an unexpected way, it’s exciting and fun. But when people distort that to mean: ‘I can say anything I want, about anyone I want, no matter how cruel’… then you’re in trouble. Mum jokes sit slightly uneasily in this continuum between really innocent fun and this potential damage.” And therein lies their power.

Anon secondary school pupil, early 1990s

[Humour and heterosexual hierarchies, Mary Jane Kehily and Anoop Nayak]

As a joke form, it teeters. Is it exquisitely personal, or absurdly abstracted? Is it a stab in the chest, or a pat on the back? Does it include or exclude? In the early nineties, Mary Jane Kehily and Anoop Nayak – professors of “gender and education” and “social and cultural geography” respectively – interviewed around 100 teachers and pupils in West Midlands secondary schools. Their attention was captured by the “cussing” or “blowing” matches, in which insults were traded between pupils. One teacher, Mr Carlton, sounds especially exasperated in their report: “We used to have, ‘Your mum’s a dog’… ‘Your mum’s a sweaty armpit’… my God, you should have heard some of the things that were said. And it was always about their mother, right, because that is the thing that everyone has in common. They all know their mother, and that’s very personal… it hurts. And you get all these brash kids who’ve been reduced to tears by some of the comments that have been thrown at them.”

Not only were the subjects of these cussing matches always mum – not dad – but the participants were invariably boys, not girls. Why? Because, the study suggests, the performance was bound up in the foggy limbo-land that the schoolboys were navigating between childhood and manhood. 

Your mum jokes play to the basest of cultural stereotypes. Most often, it’s the size of your mother (too fat, too skinny), her stupidity or her sexuality that’s mocked. They hang on the cliché that mothers should be pure and saintly (never stupid, promiscuous or glutinous) and so lots has been said about their misogyny. But the cliché runs both ways. Their potency depends on two male stereotypes. One: little boys worship their mums. Two: real men don’t cry. Take offence at a “your mum” joke, get flustered or – god forbid – well up, and you’re a child. Smirk, thick-skinned and impervious, and you rise up the newly emerging pecking order. As the researchers say: “The invocation of a boy’s mother… taps into the contradictory private emotions of maternal affection, and the public disavowal of the ‘feminine’.” They are, in essence, single-sentence Greek tragedies.

Macca, secondary school pupil, early 1990s

[Humour and heterosexual hierarchies, Mary Jane Kehily and Anoop Nayak]

Except, that is, when they’re comedies. Because, the researchers noted, “your mum” jokes are chameleon in nature: “at other moments young men drew upon these familiar codes to generate humour amongst friends out of school”. Traded between boys who trust each other, they suggest, the shared mischief of a “your mum” joke can create camaraderie, not conflict: “Here, the act of transgression is itself treasured, where the rules and norms of middle-class society are inverted for shock value.” 

To untangle these threads, I turned to Caleb Warren, associate professor of marketing at the University of Arizona and co-founder of the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, a place dedicated “to the scientific study of humor, its antecedents, and its consequences”. 

“When we started this project, we were interested in what makes moral violations funny,” he explains. “Because we came across a lot of things that were like, ‘Oh, man, that’s so wrong’, but it’s also funny, right?” “Mom jokes”, he suggests, are a classic example. Ableist, sizeist, just downright disrespectful. And yet, in certain specific circles, irresistibly funny. Why? The lab developed an explanation called Benign Violation Theory. “Humor occurs,” its literature explains, “when and only when three conditions are satisfied: (1) a situation is a violation, (2) the situation is benign, and (3) both perceptions occur simultaneously.”

Your mum jokes violate the sacred status of mothers. But to work, the violation must be just the right size. “It’s likely to be funnier if there’s an element of truth, blown way out of proportion,” explains Warren. Saying “your mom’s fat”, when everyone knows she’s a size zero, will probably flop, since it’s demonstrably untrue, so barely a violation. On the other hand, “your mum’s so fat she wears a size 18” might be too plausible a violation to be interpreted as benign. It’s just an insult. No fun. The sweet spot, if you’re a tween boy, might be something more like: “your mum’s so fat, she doesn’t need the internet. She’s already world-wide.” 

David, a member of the Thunderbirds, 1960s South Central Harlem

[William Labov, Language in the Inner City] 

There’s actually an equation for this. I stumbled across it in a vintage paper by the venerated American professor of linguistics William Labov:

T(B) is so X that P

In the 1960s, Labov gained the trust of four young Black peer groups in South Central Harlem. The Thunderbirds and the Aces were aged between nine and 13, while the Jets and the Cobras were between 13 and 17. Over the course of several years he made detailed studies of their language. All of them played a game in which insults were traded, often referred to as “the dozens” but which Labov calls soundings. The most common subject for insult? Your mother. 

The older groups flung them faster, more fluently and with more control. In the company of younger groups, Labov watched the game spill into rage and tears. Soundings, in his accounts, look like ritual initiations – a safe space to practise the skills required to become a man in that time and place. But to be safe, to remain a ritual and not a scrap, rules must be in place. So back to Labov’s equation: T(B) is so X that P.

A member of the Jets says: “Your mother so skinny, she ice skate on a razor blade.”

T – your mother

X – skinny

P– ice skating on a razor blade

To balance the equation: “X may be attributable to your mother, but not P,” writes Labov. She might be skinny, but she definitely doesn’t skate on razor blades. Inverse proportions are at play. The wilder the insult, the less offence is taken. 

The game tested linguistic flexibility, inventiveness and agility. Often, it appeared silly, a frivolous way to pass time on the street or a bus journey. But these skills were worth sharpening, Labov observed. Because a cracking “your mum” comeback was a powerful weapon, even out in the bigger, wider, scarier world. “To deny a sound is to admit that it is not a matter of general knowledge that it is obviously untrue,” Labov wrote. If you ask: “are you stupid?” and I reply with, say: “Your mum’s so stupid when you stand next to her you hear the ocean,” I have you backed into a corner. If you rise to the bait, you’re admitting that it is true. If you don’t, I’ve diffused the situation and possibly swerved a punch or worse.But what of the B in our equation? Labov places it in brackets, directly after T (your mum), explaining that it stands for the boy whose mum is being ridiculed. Any insult against a boy’s mother is actually aimed directly at his own heart and status. His selfhood and his mother’s remain permeable, long after the umbilical cord is cut. In fact, Labov realised, the formula T(B) is so X that P was so powerful that boys could even lose P and X, merely dropping T into conversations at any possible opportunity, however surreal or absurd. Even in ghost-form, robbed of its punchline, the joke remained so potent it could wound, wind-up friends or win status. And that is how the most powerful phrase in a 12-year-old’s arsenal became the teetering, unbalanced and nonsensical first half of an equation. Just two words: “Your mum.”

Hattie Garlick, is an author and a journalist. Your mum loves her work.

This piece originally appeared in Faith, the 13th edition of Tortoise Quarterly. Faith, and all other editions, are available in to order in glorious, old-fashioned print, at a special members’ discount.