Exaggeration is core to understanding “playing the dozens,” a sophisticated form of ritualized insult that the sociologist Roger Abrahams documented while spending two years living among young black kids in urban Philadelphia in the early 1960s. Abrahams found that young black males, in particular between the ages of eight and fifteen, resorted to a canon of teases—“the dozens,” oft-heard, profane poems about the target and the target’s mother. These ritualized insults occurred only among friends, and almost exclusively provoked fun and play rather than aggression. Playing the dozens, Abrahams observed, provided a context for the boys to test one another in ways that explored sexual identity and thickened their young skin as a defense against the institutionalized hostilities they faced in the inner city. The dozens is the intellectual predecessor to rap and employs exaggeration and other signals of nonliteral meaning—rhyming, repetition.
Don’t talk about my mother ’cause you’ll make me mad.
Don’t forget how many your mother had.
She didn’t have one, she didn’t have two,
She had eighty motherfuckers just like you.
I fucked your mother in a bowl of rice.
Two children jumped out shootin’ dice.
One shot seven and one shot eleven.
God damn, them children ain’t goin’ to heaven.
Repetition is a classic element of the tease, and violates the rule of quantity. If a friend says you are a really good neck rubber, you blush with pride. If she says you are a really, really, really, really outrageously fantastic neck rubber, you are likely to bristle a bit, recall questionable massage techniques—the use of your elbows and your nose—you’ve experimented with, wonder what her point is, and rise to defend yourself.
Repetitive formulaic expressions rhythmically placed within social routines signal teasing. These linguistic acts are a reliable part of the quotidian life of healthy families. Parents have been known to short-circuit their children’s mutinous reactions to their dinner with repetitive, formulaic expressions (“here’s your dog food”) to make light of, and preempt, their prickly objections.
We violate the rule of manner, or directness and clarity, in innumerable ways to tease. Idiomatic expressions—quirky nicknames and relationship-specific phrases—are a common element of teasing, zeroing in on idiosyncracies and potentially problematic characteristics of the target. We violate the rules of manner with several vocal cues, including sing-song voice, loud, rapid delivery, dramatized sighs, and utterances that are either louder or quieter than preceding utterances. All of these acts deviate from the prosody of clarity and directness. And of course there is the wink, the very emblem of off-record indirectness. The wink violates the sincere and truthful orientation of direct, straightforward gaze, and recognizes an audience to the side, thus signaling that all is not what it appears to be.
With exaggeration, repetition, and idiomatic phrases, with elongated vowels and shifts in the speed and pitch of our delivery, with tongue protrusions, well-timed laughs, and expressive caricature of others, we violate the maxims of sincere communication, all in the service of teasing. We provoke, on the one hand, but artfully signal that nonliteral interpretations of the provocation are possible. We signal that we do not necessarily mean what we say, that our actions are to be taken in the spirit of play.
When we tease, linguist Herb Clark observes, we frame the interaction as one that occurs in a playful, nonserious realm of social exchange. When done with a light touch and style, teasing is a game, a dramatic performance, one filled with shared laughter that transforms conflicts—between rivals in a hierarchy, romantic partners, siblings finding separate spaces—into playful negotiations. It is in artful teasing that we lightheartedly provoke, to discern one another’s commitments. It is with artful teasing that we convert many problems in social living to opportunities for higher jen ratios.
POLITE ROARS AND CROAKS
The philosopher Bertrand Russell argued, “The fundamental concept in social science is power, in the same sense that Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.” Power is a basic force in human relationships.
Power hierarchies have many benefits. Hierarchies help organize the collective actions necessary to gathering resources, raising offspring, defense, and mating. They provide heuristic, quick-decision rules about the allocation of resources and the division of labor (often favoring those in power). They provide protection for those involved (and peril to those outside the hierarchy).
Alongside their benefits, hierarchies are costly to negotiate. Conflicts over rank and status are very often a deadly affair. Male fig wasps have large mandibles that they put to deadly use in conflicts over mates and territory, most typically chopping each other in half. When several males find themselves on the same fig fruit, lethal combat quickly arises. One fig fruit contained 15 females, 12 uninjured males, and 42 damaged males who were dead or on their way to dying, with holes in the thorax and abdomen. Male narwhals use their drill-like tusks to conduct their negotiations over rank. In one hierarchy of male narwhals, over 60 percent of the males had broken tusks, and most had head scars or tips of tusks embedded in their jaws.
Given the enormous costs of negotiating rank, many species have shifted to ritualized battles. Displays of strength are exchanged in symbolic, dramatized form, and rank is negotiated through signaling rather than costly physical engagement. Red deer stags establish their rank in the autumn rut with roaring. The male who can roar louder and faster is assumed to be larger and stronger, and enjoys the ensuing evolutionary benefits (and, one hopes, the pleasures) of large harems of females. Harem holders will roar for hours on end, into the wee hours of the morning. They often lose weight in the process, to best their peers—all of which is a much better alternative than direct combat, injury, and an increased probability of death.
It is well known that many frogs and toads use the depth of their croaks to negotiate rank. Male frogs in one experiment were much less likely to attack another male when a deep croak was played by loudspeaker next to the pair. The deep vocalization, produced by large vocal cords, was assumed by both to be the signal of an exceptionally strong rival.
In humans, teasing can be thought of as the stag’s roar or the frog’s croak—a ritualized, symbolic means by which group members negotiate rank. Teasing is a dramatized performance clearly preferable to the obvious alternative—violent confrontations over rank and honor. Guided by this reasoning, former student Erin Heerey and I sought to capture teasing as a ritualized status contest. The issue we confronted was how to capture these brief status contests, so prevalent in the locker rooms and dugouts and keg parties of male youth, in the laboratory. Having people write narratives about their teasing experiences would miss the very heart of the tease—the nonverbal, off-record markers that give shape to the playfulness of the tease. We could have followed the formation of social hierarchies and the role teasing plays in naturalistic groups. Ritch Savin Williams had done this in a captivating study of boys’ summer camps in the 1970s, and found, indeed, that ten-to twelve-year-old boys who were rising to the top of the hierarchy, like those dominant red deer, did indeed tease more to establish their elevated positions. But we wanted to capture the subtle, exceedingly brief nonverbal arabesques of teasing, those off-record markers, which required close-up videotaping.