Joke Construction University

Something every summer camp counselor should know

This was not in the job description, but here we are.

Eric and I are upstairs in a quiet bedroom, while all the campers and counselors and cooks create the usual cacophony of tween activity downstairs on the main floor of the lodge.

All the campers except Shawn, that is.

Shawn is in the room with Eric and me. His eyes swollen from crying, his face flushed red, his emotional temperature breaking the proverbial thermometer. Shaky hands. Gritted teeth.

Eric and I, of all the camp counselors, have been elected to help talk Shawn off the ledge. And explain something that I never thought I’d ever have to explain.

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But let’s back up a little, to earlier in the day. About eight minutes earlier, to be specific.

It was the first day of the first three-week term of a summer camp for boys ages 13-15 called the Bennion Teton Boys Ranch, on a ridiculously picturesque piece of property nestled perfectly on a hillside just outside of Victor, Idaho.

The first day typically consists of the boys arriving via bus around noon and then some orientation—getting to know the staff (the directors, the cooks, the horse wrangler, and me & Eric & the rest of the counselors), getting to know each other, getting assigned to one of the three bunkhouses, laying down some ground rules and philosophical foundation (aka Lowell’s Creed). It also consists of quite a bit of feeling out, the campers (with varying degrees of social and hygienic and survival and athletic and other skills) subtly and unsubtly sorting out where they think they fit on the food chain, making friends or enemies, finding common ground, putting stakes in the ground. Y’know, outright verbal declarations or nonverbal cues that say stuff like “My friends call me Snake” or “I love Pink Floyd” or “Xbox is my identity” or other things people throw out when they have a chance to start from scratch.

Between getting unpacked/situated in their bunks and dinnertime, there’s a window of free time that often results in some pickup basketball out on the concrete court. This first day was no different.

During one game, a particularly mouthy kid from Salt Lake—it’s important to mention he’s from Salt Lake because 1) he’s still pretty close to home comparatively, 2) Salt Lake is a hub for ranch attendees and so this kid has come with at least 3-4 of his friends which means, 3) he’s feeling far more comfortable and confident than kids who came alone and are still trying to find friends—so this mouthy kid from Salt Lake, we’ll call him Matt, is talking trash. It’s pretty harmless, run-of-the-mill middle school trash talk with no line-crossing obscenities or vulgarities. Think of the insults you’d find in a Scholastic Book Fair insult book and you’re pretty close to the material he was working with. Broadly pedestrian, surface-level trash.

To add to the momentum of it all, Matt hits a couple of shots in a row, so he’s really feeling himself at that point. His already-above-average confidence is spiking and his trash talk is getting bigger, brasher. He has a visible middle-schooler swagger going as he makes his way up and down the court.

“So what’s this got to do with Shawn?” you ask.

Well, Shawn happens to be guarding Matt. Shawn is not from Salt Lake; he’s from Maryland. And he came to the ranch all by himself, so—regardless of the actual content of what Matt’s saying and even the seriousness or unseriousness of it—it doesn’t feel good to be shown up in front of your peers, especially on the first day. So, as each shot drops (insult) with an accompanying verbal outburst (injury), Shawn’s getting increasingly frustrated. Wouldn’t we all?

Around this time, Matt appears to be running out of material so he resorts to one of the old reliables: Your Mom jokes. Yo Mama, if you want to get technical. You know the ones:

“Yo mama’s so dumb she spent 2 hours starting at a glass of orange juice because it said ‘concentrate’ on the package.”

Usually about being so fat or so dumb or so ugly or so easy. Real cerebral stuff.

And so Matt, feeling like he’s on a roll, rattles a Yo Mama joke off in Shawn’s direction. I don’t remember the actual joke. But I do remember the look on Shawn’s face, a look that Matt noticed too, with some relish, because he immediately fired off another Yo Mama joke at Shawn.

”Shut up, man!” Shawn warns Matt through gritted teeth. Precisely the reaction Matt wanted.

If I had been closer to the action and known what I know now, I might’ve intervened at this point. But I’d heard a billion Yo Mama jokes in my time, even dispensed my fair share. So the jokes seemed innocuous and even Shawn’s flaring temper seemed in-line with my experience. Nothing out of the ordinary to worry about.

Matt, getting a chorus of OOOHS from his friends, is all the more emboldened. He sinks another shot and chases it with another Yo Mama joke.

This time, though, Shawn’s had it.

“You say another thing about my mom and I’m gonna punch you in the face.”

Not even a millisecond passes as Matt laughingly replies.

“Your mom’s gonna punch me in the fa…”

POW! Shawn clocks Matt, as promised, right square in the face.

Now Matt’s on the ground, shocked. And Shawn’s looming over him, shaking, “DON’T! TALK! ABOUT! MY MOM!” He’s got tears coming from his raging eyes. And Matt’s friends are getting in between the two.

But Shawn doesn’t want any more. He’s obviously a little embarrassed, more by the tears than the punch (which, all things being equal, was solid).

Steve, the director, goes to see how Matt’s doing and signals to me and Eric to go after Shawn, who’s making a beeline for somewhere, anywhere far away from the basketball court. We jog and catch up to him, reassure him that it’s ok, get him to come with us to the lodge and a quiet bedroom upstairs.

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And so you’re caught up.

We’re up in that quiet bedroom, the door closed, getting Shawn to take some deep breaths. We’re also getting him to tell us his side of the story, even though, having witnessed it from a distance, we know most of it.

“…and I told him ‘if you talk about my mom again, I’m gonna punch you in the face’ and then he said something about my mom and so…”

We asked a simple question, had he ever heard of a Yo Mama joke. And the answer was no. And so that’s how we found ourselves giving a homesick and overwhelmed 14-year old the Cliffs Notes on Yo Mama jokes.

“You see, Shawn, it’s not actually YOUR mom he’s talking about. I mean, it kind of is, I guess, but not really is, if that makes sense. The mom is just kind of, like, a symbol, an excuse, a way to point the joke at you.”

He looked at us like we were insane. Somehow, somewhere in Maryland, a boy had turned 14 years old without ever hearing or hearing of Yo Mama jokes? In America? How?

So, for better or worse, we kept going.

“It’s just like a dumb joke construction, a format, almost like a knock knock joke but ruder. It’s an idiotic way that guys rip on each other. Like, they’ll say it to their best friends. It’s supposed to be insulting, I suppose, but it’s almost never referring to the actual mother. Think about it, Shawn, does Matt know your mother? Has he ever met her? Even seen a picture of her? There’s no way Matt actually has any idea whether your mom is pretty or ugly, or fat or thin, or stupid or brilliant.”

He still looked dubious. Eric and I exchanged clueless glances. How do you explain the psychology, the sociology, the history of a Yo Mama joke?

I don’t know that we succeeded.

But I do know that I would pay a substantial sum of money to have been a fly on the wall when Shawn eventually explained this whole situation to his parents.