Customer Reviews

A Portrait of Yo Mama as a Young Man

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
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Very, very funny book. It's a play on the "yo mama" joke (a clever idea), but much of the humor transcends the concept. I have laughed out loud at this more times than I can count. Absurd insults appear along with witty twists on things like internet search wordings, kidspeak, Nietzsche, legalese--and it's all about, well, your mom (known to a lot of us as "yo mama"). Some of the short pieces are among the sharpest and strangest things I've ever seen. (Especially recommended are the e-mails from yo mama to you in college.) Overall laugh-out-loud hilarious, often sublime.

Reading it now. It's milk-out-of-your-nose funny. The concept is genius: an elaborate multifaceted insult of "Yo Mama." The execution is just perfect. (Charts and graphs included.) Recommend it to anyone whose sense of humor ranges beyond the territory covered by Everybody Loves Raymond. (With no offense meant to Ray Romano.)

as amusing as the title would suggest. picked this up off my friend's coffee table with a laugh over the weekend, after initially mistaking it for the Joyce namesake.

a great meld of highbrow/lowbrow, completely irreverant of course. excellent book to read a chapter from when you need something fun to change your train of thought. imagine these guys had a good time writing this...

"Portrait of Yo Mama as a Young Man" finds Andrew Barlow & Kent Roberts stretching the Yo Mama jokes in strange new directions previously unseen. For example, Yo Mama's resume (one of my personal favorites). Or the Yo Mama non-joke joke. "Yo Mama's so environmentally conscious, she recycles a great deal." Or jokes which are just plain odd. "Yo Mama's so February 24, 1993, she watches the 37th annual Grammy awards every night." ?! Or countless charts and graphs. Needless to say, the concept pays off in spades--the book is extremely funny.
Like "Fierce Pajamas" or Dave Barry's collections of columns, it makes sense to read this book a chapter at a time, as opposed to all in one sitting. Strongly recommended--humor writers to watch.

I would love to write a clever tribute as a review, but for now I will just say how much I adore this book. One of the few humorous books that makes me laugh out loud regularly. A truly brilliant piece of absurdist humor, and I wish to God that I had written it.

Yes. It's one big, elaborate, exhaustively documented "yo mama" joke, complete with charts, graphs, diagrams, and even a family tree. The humor consists mainly of surreally oblique non-sequiturs and general oddness. The concept is actually funnier than the text itself; I found myself laughing more at the names of the chapters than at the jokes therein.

Still, it's an amusing read - just be aware that it's more likely to produce wry grins than fits of hysterical laughter.

Depending on your sense of humor, this book may be what's termed in the industry as a "laff riot" or you may not get some of the jokes. The Onion famously tries to go over some reader's heads all of the time, but for the most part, this book doesn't use obscure references to make its jokes, just unnatural observations. If you like oblique humor, this may be right for you.