The Dozens

Here you see an album cover of musician and comedian “Speckled Red,” whose hit song “The Dirty Dozens” put samples of “the Dozens” to music, with a notable version published in 1929. But the tradition of the Dozens game goes back much further, echoing insult games that developed in western African countries like Ghana, and probably spreading from the African diaspora of the slave trade into the US and other areas like the Caribbean.

This, the game existed long before the term “The Dozens” was defined in print with the 1921 pop song “Don’t slip me in the Dozens, please”. Usually played and performed by black American men, in the Dozens you exchange insults in a game of wit. You need to be able to better your opponent’s insults on the fly, and you need to do it without getting flustered at the horrible things your opponent says about you. The most famous expressions are “your mama” jokes, and versions of the game with sexually explicit insults are sometimes called “the Dirty Dozens.”

Folklorists have many explanations as to why the Dozens arose — certainly it is a display of intellectual prowess and adds to the status of the most sophisticated callers. An idea by scholar Harry Lefever is that the Dozens was a way for Black American men to hear verbal abuse and manage it with stoicism, a skill that helped them cope with the White prejudice they inevitably experienced.

The Dozens has influenced a great deal of other cultural expressions, including more contemporary rap battles and the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Author Elijah Wood’s _Talking ‘Bout Your Mama: the Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap_ by Oxford University Press, 2014, is a great treatment of the subject.