Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Plays the Dozens

      Last week Harvard prof Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested after breaking into his own home. The arresting officer's report indicates that when he told Gates he would speak to him outside, the famous scholar allegedly replied, "ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside." What happened when they both hit the street was the most vicious dozens beatdown that a Harvard professor of literary criticism has ever laid on a Cambridge police officer.

• "Yo mama's girth is so prodigious, I was compelled to compensate my limo driver with overtime remuneration because of the time required to navigate to her good side."
• "Yo mama's intelligence is so feeble, she mistook football's "quarterback" position w/ a refund of 25¢, when in fact it has nothing to do with currency at all."
• "Yo mama's so advanced in years, a screening of the motion picture 'Jurassic Park' evoked in her a keen nostalgia for the days of her youth."
• "Yo mama's girth is so prodigious that, presuming you reside in a building with multiple floors, the safety notification posted by the responsible authority in your building's elevator reads MAXIMUM OCCUPANCY: 12 Passengers or Yo Mama."
• "Yo mama's physical appearance is so repulsive, that John Merrick, better known by his sobriquet 'The Elephant Man', because the combination of terrible deformities inflicted upon his body by a congenital disorder gave him what some witnesses perceived to be an elephantine appearance...of course his name was not really John at all, but Joseph; due to an unfortunate error of recall made in the memoirs of his one-time physician and guardian Frederick Treves, the mistaken name 'John' was perpetuated, and then reinforced in the contemporary public's mind by the Oscar-winning film 'The Elephant Man,' a fictionalized account of Merrick's life directed by avant-garde filmmaker David Lynch, who used Treves's memoir as source material. But none of this is really pertinent to my central thesis, to wit: yo mama's so ugly, the Elephant Man paid to see her."
• "Yo mama's intelligence is so feeble, she raised you, a high-handed authoritarian who believes that his position as an officer of the law empowers him to punish disrespect with imprisonment, even when the disrespect has been earned, and comes at the hands of an innocent man who has been humiliated in his own very expensive home, and who has committed no crime other than being in the wrong skin at the wrong time."