Common in African American communities, the Dozens is almost exclusively played in front of an audience, who encourage the participants to reply with increasingly severe insults in order to heighten the tension and consequently make the contest more interesting to watch.
[3] Playing the Dozens is also known as "biddin'", "blazing", "roasting", "hiking", "capping", "clowning", "ranking", "ragging", "rekking", "crumming", "sounding", "checking", "joning", "woofing", "wolfing", “skinning”, "sigging", "scoring", "signifying"[3][4] or "jiving", while the insults themselves are known as "snaps".
The first academic treatment of the Dozens was made in 1939 by Yale-based psychologist and social theorist John Dollard, who described the importance of the game among African-American men, and how it is generally played.
[10]Amuzie Chimezie, writing in the Journal of Black Studies in 1976, connects the Dozens to a Nigerian game called Ikocha Nkocha, literally translated as "making disparaging remarks".
Commentary among the Igbo is more restrained: remarks about family members are rare, and are based more in fanciful imaginings than participants' actual traits.
(1969), H. Rap Brown writes that the children he grew up with employed the Dozens to kill time and stave off boredom, in the way that whites might play Scrabble.
He hypothesized that African Americans, as victims of racism, have been unable to respond in kind towards their oppressors, and instead shifted their anger to friends and neighbors, as displayed in the strings of insults.
[14] Folklorist Alan Dundes asserted that an approach based on psychoanalytic theory and American oppression ignores the possibility that the Dozens may be native to Africa.
Abrahams states that when African Americans reach a certain age, between 16 and 26, the game loses much of its appeal and attempts to enter into sparring contests often result in violence.
[4] John Leland writes that the loser of the Dozens is the one who takes his opponent's words at face value, therefore ending his own performance in the back-and-forth exchange.
[9] "Playing the Dozens" is referenced in Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, where Janie, the protagonist, returns her husband's insults with some of her own.