Scholars of African American history and culture describe “the dozens” as an elaborate insult contest in which opponents deride members of each other’s families, usually their mothers. These competitions are typically joined in the presence of a spurring audience of peers, and their aspersions are made up of a wide range of nonsexual and sexual insults.
In Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America, Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson write that the game has many other names, including “momma talky, sounding, joning, woofing, sigging, or signifying.” While the names vary, the rules of the game remain the same. The game incorporates elements of boxing, chess, and poetry, and the aim is not only to win, but to deliver a knockout. Fought before a crowd, the verbal pugilist wants not only his opponent, but all who witness the game, to think twice about confronting him or her again.
Audiences also are important to the game. First, they are needed to witness the event. Second, they are responsible for recording the verbal history of the battle and spreading it throughout the community. Third, they fuel the conflict by responding to the “snaps” (insults), and their reactions determine the winner. Drawing the crowd’s laughter is what wins the battle. To elicit laughter, the insults must be clever, original, and appear to have been crafted solely for the opponent. The insults also must touch a shared reality. For example: “Your family is so poor, your father’s face is on food stamps.”
Playing the dozens also requires strategy. To win a battle, contestants must stay two or three snaps ahead of their opponent. Even as contestants are being attacked, they should be setting up countersnaps. Snaps also have to be delivered properly to work effectively. The setup “your mother is so fat …” is a classic example of how to cock the hammer for the ensuing snap, “she broke her arm and gravy poured out.” One of the mainstays of the dozens is attacking the contestants’ mothers. Mother jokes, in fact, were once the “big guns” of the game. Their deployment was saved as a last resort, one that often elicited the response, “Don’t talk about my mother!” Nowadays, “your mother” is instead a stylized opening of most snaps.
Brown describes the dozens as a mean game: “What you try to do is totally destroy somebody else with words. It’s that whole competition thing again, fighting each other. There’d be forty or fifty dudes standing around and the winner was determined by the way they responded to what was said. If you fell all over each other laughing, then you knew you’d scored. It was a bad scene for the dude that was getting humiliated” (Brown 1969).
According to Saloy, the dozens has its origins in the slave trade of New Orleans, where deformed slaves—generally slaves punished with dismemberment for disobedience—were grouped in lots of a cheap dozen for sale to slave owners. For a slave to be sold as part of the dozens was the lowest blow possible. In an effort to toughen their hearts against the continual verbal assault inflicted on them as part of the dozens, slaves practiced insulting each other indirectly by attacking the most sacred possible target, the other person’s mother. The person who lost his cool and came to blows lost the contest. The person who outwitted and outinsulted the other while keeping a cool head was the winner.
A. June Chimezie also believes that the game may have African roots. He notes that among the Igbos of Nigeria, Ikocha Nkocha, a game strikingly similar to the dozens, is played by children, adolescents, and teenagers. The game is usually played at night in the presence of parents, siblings, and other adults and relatives. To illustrate Ikocha Nkocha, Chimezie uses the following example:
Ibe: Eze, let us play Ikocha Nkocha.
Eze: All right, are you ready?
Ibe: Yes, I am ready, but you start.
Eze (to audience): Churu m ya (“Scare him away for me.”).
Audience (to Ibe): Cha, cha, cha (a sound usually made to scare away an animal).
Eze: Look at him with his ears shaped like the prickled ears of a dog that has just heard the pounding of food in a mortar.
Audience (to Ibe): Are you going to let him get away with that?
Audience (to Eze): Cha, cha, cha.
Ibe: Look at him with cheeks like those of a child whose mother bore him a junior sibling too early.
Audience (to Eze): He gave you a worse one. (Chimezie 1976)
Ikocha Nkocha, which means making disparaging remarks, is found not only among the Igbos of Nigeria but also in other African societies, including Ghana. In Ghana, the game is traditionally an engagement that takes place after supper in the moonlight, but unlike many Igbos, Ghanaian players often allow the leveling of aspersions on the contestants’ parents and other relatives. Like the American version of the game, the Igbo and African American forms allow only two contestants at a time and may be played between friends and siblings, and by both boys and girls. One of the distinguishing differences between the African American version and the African varieties of the game is that players in the United States often use rhymes.
Majors and Billson also believe that the game has roots in Africa. One theory they discuss is that the dozens originated with American field slaves who used the game in place of physical assaults on untouchable, higher-status house slaves. Field slaves would be lashed or deprived of food if they harmed the often-pampered house servants. Cotton pickers, sugarcane workers, and other field laborers suffered from the shame of lower status and poorer conditions compared to generally lighter-skinned house workers who were butlers, coachmen, lackeys, maids, and housekeepers. The dozens thus may have offered field slaves a low-risk method of lashing out at protected house slaves.
In America, many believe the dozens is one of the African American oral traditions from which rap music is derived. In an article in FT magazine, noted African American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes:
[T]he first person I ever heard “rap” was a man born in 1913—my father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr. Daddy’s generation didn’t call the rhetorical games they played “rapping”; they “signified,” they “played the dozens.” But this was rapping just the same, rapping by another name. Signifying is the grandparent of rap, and rap is signifying in a postmodern way. The narratives that my father recited in rhyme told the tale of defiant heroes named Shine or Stagolee, or, my favorite, the Signifying Monkey. They were linguistically intricate, they were funny and spirited, and they were astonishingly profane. (Gates 2010)
Sexual insults are a major part of the game. In Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, edited by Clarence Major, the game is referred to as “dirty dozen.” Majors and Billson suggest that young black males may use the dozens game to show off their hip or cool attitude toward sex. They may also use the game to test, make fun of, or embarrass individuals from families with limited exposure to sexual matters. For those males whose families are less open about discussing sex, the dozens game may provide a kind of orientation to sexuality. Black adolescent females also help to shape and socialize the males in their use of sexually related material in the dozens game, possibly because of their similar interests, state of development, or the entertainment the game offers.
Majors and Billson suggest that the game plays a significant role in the psychological development of young African Americans. It may also reflect the high verbal ability of some youths who enjoy the trial of a verbal war that is shunned by mainstream culture, yet subculturally esteemed. In “Playing the Dozens: A Mechanism for Social Control,” Harry Lefever describes the game as a survival technique, “a protective device against being victimized. By playing the game, young black men learn how to face up to an antagonistic society and to deal with their conflicts both with the larger white society and within their own family and peer groups. Rather than resorting to physical means to resolve conflicts, the dozens evolved as a way to develop self-control and to handle one’s temper” (Le Fever 1981).
While many believe that the dozens are more likely to be played in low-income areas by adolescent black males, in reality it cuts across social class boundaries and may also be played by black females and some white teens. A recent example of this is the MTV reality television show Yo Mama. During the show, the host visits different regions in California where he has people tell “Yo Mama” jokes to each other. The person who has the best Yo Mama jokes faces the winner of another region. While many of the players are males, they represent a variety of ethnicities. In the article “Playing the Dozens: Its History and Psychological Significance,” J. G. Bruhn and J. L. Murray suggest that the dozens helps establish communication and understanding between ethnic groups when the players know and follow the rules of the game. The dozens also may be played in a variety of venues. A game of the dozens can be sparked by contact on the basketball court or words exchanged on the street. The dozens also are often featured in comedy routines by African American comedians.
Ann Y. White
See also Jumping the Broom; Juneteenth
Further Reading
Brown, H. Rap. 1969. Die Nigger Die! New York: Dial Press.
Bruhn, J. G., and J. L. Murray. 1985. “Playing the Dozens: Its History and Psychological Significance.” Psychological Reports 56: 483–494.
Chimezie, A. June. 1976. “The Dozens: An African Heritage Theory.” Journal of Black Studies 6 (4): 401–420.
Gates, H. L. 2010. “An Anthology of Rap Music Lyrics.” FT Magazine. October 29, 2013.
Gates, H. L. 2012. The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader, edited by Abby Wolf. New York: Basic Civitas.
Lefever, H. G. 1981. “Playing the Dozens: A Mechanism for Social Control.” Phylon 42 (1): 73–85.
Major, Clarence, ed. 1994. Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang. New York: Penguin Books.
Majors, R., and J. Billson. 1992. Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America. New York: Touchstone.
Saloy, Mona Lisa. 2013. “African American Oral Traditions in Louisiana.” Louisiana Living Traditions, October 31.