There’s also a psychological aspect culturally, a person’s mom is sacred and speaking ill of her is taboo. Your mom jokes are less about someone’s actual mom and more about the fun of the banter involved and taking things to the limit. They use someone’s mom as a target, and greatly amplify the consequences for possessing that attribute.
Your mom jokes typically address a trait of cultural insecurity. Additionally, there’s a lot of variation of spelling for the phrase, but any variation will do. An example of one of these is “Yo mama’s so ugly that when she looked in the mirror, her reflection ran away!” There’s almost never any offensive intent behind the phrase when it’s used. It tends to be something like poor, fat, or ugly. Typically, the adjective that follows your mom isn’t very pleasant. Its ending is always an over-exaggerated consequence in response to the first part of the joke. Pieces may be omitted to suit the individual speaker, but the beginning format of a your mom joke typically follows as your mom (is) so. It’s only possible to pinpoint when they became more popular. Like the Dozens itself, it’s impossible to trace the exact origin for your mom jokes.
These contestants played a game dubbed The Dirty Dozens and were required to insult each other’s moms in a similar fashion to today’s your mom jokes.
This genre of jokes began to be enjoyed by a wider audience in the 1990s when the TV show In Living Color featured a sketch where game show contestants faced off against one another. Your mom jokes were an offshoot of the Dozens. Topics that are fair game in the Dozens include appearance, style of dress, economic status, and very often, one’s mother. Its attributes became important ingredients in the development of rap music, especially because word mastery is required for both. He found that it’s usually played by black children in urban neighborhoods and often involves a face-off in the presence of a crowd. In 1939, John Dollard studied the Dozens. In some versions, rhyming is involved, and in all versions improvisation is, too. The game has existed since at the least the early 1920s, when it was referenced in Henry Troy’s song “Don’t Slip Me in the Dozens, Please.” One of his lyrics makes it clear that the game has retained its core attributes to the present day: “Slipping you in the dozen means to talk about your fam’ly folks / And talkin’ ‘bout your parents aren’t jokes.” As the song suggests, the dozens involves a back and forth of verbal sparring between two people, but played for laughs. The Dozens is the game that gave birth to present-day your mom jokes.