Mom jokes are the longest lasting jokes from childhood I can recall; well after the “in your faces” and “I know you are, but what am Is,” people were still making fun of each other’s mom. I still remember as a kid when these first started to permeate into common usage, and what a stir they created:

“Hey Ted, next time you see your mom say to her: ‘Mom may I,’ then spell ‘cup.’ ”
(During the time it takes me to figure it out my friends giggle uncontrollably).
“My mom… what?! Oh, shut up!”

I don’t know about you but the weaker kids at my school actually bawled, or the equal and opposing reaction, some stronger ones got really aggressive! I know kids that used to shout:

“My mom? Fuck you!” Remember, particularly in the suburbs of my youth, swearing is somewhat uncommon at this age. Then, after clenching a fist: “Come here and say that again!”

There’s not much in life as a prepubescent child that elicits such an escalated reaction; you’d think kids would be able to take a little jest. This mom joke thing was a pretty big deal right off the bat, yet this was only the beginning.

The childish mom jokes ended around the inception of high school, and that’s when things really began to get serious. Mom jokes got to be pretty grotty, particularly noticeable as high school advanced. The gym seemed particularly saturated with mom-humour; my workout spotter and I were merciless. When running the track we’d push each other to go faster by enlightening the other about the grotesque acts we’d performed on the other’s mother last night and when we lifted weights, as inspiration to finish that last rep, we would cite rewards such as giving the other one’s mom the night off for once.

You would think that after the immaturity of high school, the cool-headedness of university would purge the idea of poking fun at someone’s mother forever, right? Come on, two of the guys living in my house both have moms named Debbie, how could I not make repeated references to myself in a Debbie-sandwich? In fact, the whole inspiration for this article happened a few weeks ago while, after calling the house I lived in a ‘haggard bitch,’ my roommate turned around and shocked me:

“Nancy’s a haggard bitch.”

That was pretty harsh (Nancy is, if you haven’t figured it out, my mom), but he actually has no issue with Nancy whatsoever! Having been my roommate for some time, he has become one of those friend figures who attends family dinner at home occasionally, so why does calling her a haggard bitch create such a feeling of glee?

There’s a good reason for mother bashing and it stems from the fact that humans have close, rather unusual relationships with mothers. This study of the mom joke has actually brought me into a closer understanding of Freud’s Oedipus Complex – you know, that weird theory that says everyone innately wants to fornicate with (or invest libidinal energy into) the mother and kill the father. Lacan argues that it doesn’t have to be that absolute, but there are certain reasons our attitude towards our mothers are so convoluted and strange. So when does this all begin? Well, my mother taught me to always start at the beginning…

Picture this: A nine-month hiatus in Eden in which there are no responsibilities and everything is warm. Sustenance is not a problem and I have known nothing else: no light and no imagery, only simple, gluey, pre-egotistic bliss. Without prior warning, when nine arbitrary months have passed, I’m quickly and rudely expelled from this paradise into a world that is noisy, cold and ruthless, flooding me with images I don’t understand. The only tether tying me to my home is severed immediately and I take my first rasping, painful breath of air.

I’m placed in my mother’s arms but do I even understand who she is yet? Everything is so overwhelming, how can I even place myself in this orgy of images that assault my freshly developed eyes? My fractured sense of self must be particularly demeaning after the intense feeling of security I had prior to being thrust naked into a society that preexists me by several millennia. This, in fact, is the first moment in which I’m able to distinguish between good and bad, light and dark, and other such opposing feelings; all dualities are simply the conclusion of this first traumatic entry. Was everything not perfect beforehand? The first few years of life in this confusing mess without any frame of reference are so brutal that I have suppressed any memory of them, spinning with very little semblance of what is going on. As I grow older, I realize the empowering quality of being able to create pleasurable moments as opposed to that overwhelming, original traumatic moment and seek out activities that compound to help me forget this horror.

But I digress. I still have no semblance of what I am, which is the only route to being able to control the elements surrounding me. My mother has become the figure that nurtures me, arranging many of these fundamentals that are original pleasure, one of the more noticeable ones being food, which creates mixed feelings with regard to my relationship with her. She caused the traumatic events that begot all this turmoil; although she tries her damndest to remedy this, the unhappiness is so intense and I don’t quite accept the logistics of why I’m not allowed return to Eden. When did I start accepting the outer world as anything but callous and miserable? Freud didn’t quite get there, but Lacan attempts an answer to this question with his theory of the Mirror Stage, the first moment I fully recognize the potentials of my body and begin to form my ego. Alienating myself from my splintered sense of self, I start to assemble the vessel that carries me through every day-to-day scenario with the all important notion of “I.”

I come to recognize that my parents communicate with each other to make sense of all these images, so I adopt this structure as I realize that certain sounds refer to certain objects and I’m now well on my way to being able to interact with my environment. But I’m still undeniably attached to my mother: she is still the omnipotent figure that has given me life, taken away paradise, yet has also nurtured me throughout this terrifying process. Of course I love her! I’ve replaced the lost paradise with an attachment to my mother, the bringer of all positive things. When I want my mother to pay attention to me, I vocalize this pressing need into words she can understand, for no one truly knows what I want without me addressing them directly in their register. To receive love and attention, I use these words to produce a desire that she fulfills, creating basic language association between objects and myself as a means to contentment, eventually, in the modern Western world, perpetuating a fetishism of commodities. I use this relationship to objects as a means to control the volatile eruptions of the loss I’ve experienced. Whether I deign to sleep with my mother or want her to be devoted to me forever is irrelevant – I still feel as though I need her desperately, but her attention is forever split between me, her offspring, and my father, her spouse.

Hence, the second moment of great disappointment is met: I realize that I have the power to hone my wishes upon another to emulate my first moments of happiness, yet there is never any guarantee that those feelings will be returned to my level of intensity; my mother will love my father as a lover, while I will only receive the tender love of a family member, unable to elevate myself to their level of emotion. To rise above this new tragedy, I must accept a new attachment to my life other than myself or my mother: that of the phallic third, an impression of the potential that I could one day be as powerful as my father seems to be. However, this final severance from my mother does leave a permanent wound, as it brings with it the original fear of rejection that I have in all of my relationships. My mother will always carry the connotations of this overarching negativity that, in essence, defines me.

See, the Oedipus Complex isn’t entirely irrelevant, is it?

How does this tie into mom jokes? There’s no better way to overcome these constantly repressed emotions than to throw the spotlight on them in someone else! In this light, mom jokes are the ultimate vocal revenge against my own mother, throwing out an insight that forcefully brings back these negative feelings in another. When my roommate called Nancy a “haggard bitch,” my mind flew back to the constant internal struggle that has not yet gotten over the duality of my mother, having removed me from the perfection that was her womb, effectively sparking the original struggle for happiness that I strive for on a daily basis. Pretty cruel eh? At a younger age, I had not set up the strong walls that now defend my ego against the tirade of emotion that result from my original departure, which justifies these first strong reactions to the explicit mention of mothers in some children.

The never ending stream of mom jokes can be seen permeated through culture, from the Elizabethan theatre of Shakespeare’s work, Timon of Athens, I.I.:

Apemantus: He wrought better that made the painter; and yet
he's but a filthy piece of work.
Painter: Y'are a dog.
Apemantus: Thy mother's of my generation. What's she, if I be a dog?

Saturday Night Live milks the mama walloping in 1975:

Chevy Chase: Ok, you're qualified for this job, how about a starting salary, $5000?
Richard Pryor: Yo mama!
Chevy Chase: Um, $7500 a year...
Richard Pryor: Yo GRAND-mama!
Chevy Chase: Fifteen thousand dollars a year, Mr. Wilson, you'll be the highest paid janitor in America, just don't, don't hurt me!
Richard Pryor: Ok. You want me to start now?
Chevy Chase: Oh, no no no, it's alright, I'll clean all this up. Take a couple weeks off, you look tired!

Also seen during the Will Ferrell lead Celebrity Jeopardy skits of the nineties:

(In the category: THE LETTER THAT COMES AFTER B).
Alex Trebek: The word ‘cat’ is found under this letter in the dictionary.
Sean Connery: I believe you’d find it in the R section.
Alex Trebek: No no no, not in the Rs.
Sean Connery: Not in the Rs? That’s not what your mother said!

The underlying effect of becoming who I am has forever scarred me with a soft spot in the psyche for my mother, setting me alongside most other animals on this planet; I simply have the means to use an existing structure to vocalize my condition. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to grab a Debbie sandwich.