Hey, remember how Anil Dash overanalyzed LOLcats and sucked all the fun out of a perfectly vapid internet meme? Well, the internet killjoy has done it again, this time with last night's epic Yo Momma Intergalactic Political Smackdown, which took place on The Twitter. Read last night's Boing Boing post first, then dive in to Anil's post-game analysis. Snip:
While this is all in good fun, what's startling to me is that none of the jokes I've seen mention, or even allude to, race. Playing the dozens is a uniquely and explicitly African American tradition, and we obviously have an African American candidate favored in the race for the first time ever, and yet it hasn't come up.
Some of this, of course, is selection bias due to the audience that Twitter reaches. (At least so far.) But as these jokes from last night are already making their way around online as email forwards and apparently getting quoted in offices across the country, it seems to me like the playfulness of the language and the absurdity of the medium may have masked something timely and fitting. This obviously and instrinsically black tradition has been adopted by a community like Twitter that is, frankly, disproportionately not black. You could see it as the deracination of the tradition, or even worse as a deliberate omission of cultural context in its appropriation. But I actually see it as something positive.
A running joke on Twitter is all in good fun, but I find the unselfconsciousness of this little political gag to be a comforting reflection of the way that the larger trend around this election is moving as well. Like Barack Obama, playing the dozens is obviously black but we're able to just include that implicitly in our participation without having denying or diminish it. That feels like progress.
Yo Mama's So Fat… (dashes.com). You really should read all the way to the last graf in his post. I'm not gonna blog any spoilers here.
Smart and insightful, and one of a million reasons I love Anil Dash. Even if his momma's a ho.
