Funk/hip-hop foursome Wuf Ticket's "Ya Mama" (1982) was a top 25 hit on Billboard Magazine's soul chart in the year of its release; the group's only real hit was also an early example of purposeful, sustained humor throughout a rap tune. Have you heard of "Ya Mama" and/or Wuf Ticket?

Before the Wuf Ticketeers arrive at a truce and end with praise for all mothers and insults directed at a variety of people from politicians to landlords, "Ya Mama" is a rap adaptation of playing the dozens. The dozens is a verbal sparring game played originally among African-American men belittling each other and their families (especially their moms) with increasingly severe insults. Per its Wikipedia entry, the game's name name is apparently somewhat mysterious. Various academicians have postulated that "the dozens" could have derived from a 12-line rhyme pattern for the insults exchanged, an abbreviation for bulldozing (in the verb's original sense of beating or thrashing), the obsolete English verb "dozen" (to make powerless, stupefy, daze, stun, etc.) or, a tern for deformed slaves sold (and seeming grouped in allotments of 12) by a master at a discounted rate. Regardless how the term originated, have you ever played or heard anyone else play the dozens?

Wuf Ticket's name has long been a mystery to me as well. But there are numerous origin stories for "wolf ticket," the term whence it came. However plausible, which tale(s) do you like?

In the early 1990's, Southern California hip-hoppers The Pharcyde reprised Wuf Ticket's concept and got a tad cussy for their own "Ya Mama." It contains many more hilarious insults of maternal parents,. Whether or not you called it playing the dozens, have you ever had fun insulting some else's mom?

Whether to anyone's mother or anyone else, I'd kind of like to hear more songs and raps of insults, if only to counterbalance all the songs about love and lust. Are you with me on that?