My wife basically did this to her racist grandpa one time. I think they were having dinner with friends and she goes “Gwampa, I have a question, is a ‘Jive-Ass Jigaboo’ the same thing as a ‘Jungle Bunny’?”
It did not go over well with her grandpa’s friends lmao.
Edit: My wife wanted me to add because I didn’t mention it originally that she was 15 when she did this. So she was 100% aware of the live grenade she was lobbing into this conversation. I was also misremembering a little of the context these people weren’t friends they were people related to her grandpa’s labor union basically he was trying to impress and really laying it on thick. One of whom was a black man. Hence it being this particular live grenade.
Yeah, jive isn’t the offensive part; the appropriation mixed with the racist slur is.
Jive is a set of slang or cant originating from NY jazz culture, specifically Harlem. Jive was a “cool” way of speaking; we owe the word hipster to jive (hep-cats became hepsters became hipsters).
Jive-ass is just an adjective meaning useless, worthless, or full of shit. A way less offensive variation is jive-ass turkey i.e. a bullshitter. Probably stems from jive speakers using jive to hustle or exclude outsiders from the conversation.
I think it would be safe to say that jive is a subset of AAVE, but not an equivalent term. AAVE is recognized as the official dialect but jive is specifically tied to music, region, and time period.
FWIW, I think the humor of the Airplane! jive scene is twofold: 1) it demonstrates how mainstream both jazz and jive had become by the 70s (to point that old white ladies got it) and, 2) the the implication that jive speakers couldn’t understand regular American English and were in need of translation.
My wife basically did this to her racist grandpa one time. I think they were having dinner with friends and she goes “Gwampa, I have a question, is a ‘Jive-Ass Jigaboo’ the same thing as a ‘Jungle Bunny’?”
It did not go over well with her grandpa’s friends lmao.
Edit: My wife wanted me to add because I didn’t mention it originally that she was 15 when she did this. So she was 100% aware of the live grenade she was lobbing into this conversation. I was also misremembering a little of the context these people weren’t friends they were people related to her grandpa’s labor union basically he was trying to impress and really laying it on thick. One of whom was a black man. Hence it being this particular live grenade.
What’s “Jive-ass Jigaboo”?
“Jive” is an older term for what you might call less offensively call Ebonics or AAVE. Popular in the 80’s, I remember my mom talking about having a computer program that would “translate” things into jive (while also talking about doing black face for Halloween….)
“Jigaboo” is a slur for a black person.
Yeah, jive isn’t the offensive part; the appropriation mixed with the racist slur is.
Jive is a set of slang or cant originating from NY jazz culture, specifically Harlem. Jive was a “cool” way of speaking; we owe the word hipster to jive (hep-cats became hepsters became hipsters).
Jive-ass is just an adjective meaning useless, worthless, or full of shit. A way less offensive variation is jive-ass turkey i.e. a bullshitter. Probably stems from jive speakers using jive to hustle or exclude outsiders from the conversation.
I think it would be safe to say that jive is a subset of AAVE, but not an equivalent term. AAVE is recognized as the official dialect but jive is specifically tied to music, region, and time period.
FWIW, I think the humor of the Airplane! jive scene is twofold: 1) it demonstrates how mainstream both jazz and jive had become by the 70s (to point that old white ladies got it) and, 2) the the implication that jive speakers couldn’t understand regular American English and were in need of translation.