What does “signifying monkey” mean?

The trickster of Black folk toasts who defeats the lion with talk alone — and the name for that whole rhetorical art.

Entry · catalog no. 0017

signifying monkey

/ ˈsɪɡnəˌfaɪɪŋ ˈmʌŋki /SIG-nuh-fy-ing MUNG-kee

noun · Black American, Southern-rooted and urbanized · 1900s

✓ Verified

The central figure of a Black American narrative toast: a small monkey who provokes a lion into attacking an elephant by reporting insults the elephant never made. The lion is destroyed; the monkey survives on nothing but his mouth. Hundreds of versions exist, and the monkey usually gets caught out at the end by his own gloating.

“He knew every verse of the Signifying Monkey by heart before he was twelve.”

By extension, the tradition the figure names: winning by indirection — insinuation, misdirection, double meaning, saying a thing so it lands sideways. Henry Louis Gates Jr. built a full theory of Black literary practice on this figure in 1988, arguing that Black writers revise each other the way the monkey works the lion.

“That whole speech was signifying — he never once said the man's name.”

Origin & Attribution

Black American oral tradition, carried in the toast — a long rhymed narrative performed from memory in barbershops, pool halls, street corners, barracks and prisons. Roger D. Abrahams collected versions on the streets of Philadelphia; Bruce Jackson recorded more than a hundred variants from Black prisoners in Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. Two corrections. The popular sense of signifying as mere trash-talk flattens a specific art of indirection. And Gates's tracing of the figure to the Yoruba trickster deity Esu-Elegbara is an influential scholarly argument about origins, not a documented transmission — it belongs in the record as his thesis, not as settled fact.

1960

Oscar Brown Jr. records "Signifyin' Monkey" for Sin & Soul

1964

Roger D. Abrahams prints Philadelphia street versions in Deep Down in the Jungle

1988

Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey, turns the figure into a theory of Black literature

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

Nationwide / diaspora

Black American, Southern-rooted and urbanized · 1900s

Spoken by

Black men in toast-telling settings — street corners, barbershops, the military, prisons

$SIGNIFThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Steady

66 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

65/100

peak cultural energy

Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.

Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest

First used

1960

in the culture

Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.

Hear it spoken

By region — how it actually sounds

@auntiereg

Atlanta, GA

@deltasoul

Memphis, TN

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Citations & Sources

■

"Signifyin' Monkey" — Oscar Brown Jr., Sin & Soul, Columbia, recorded 1960

audio · recording

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Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia — Roger D. Abrahams, 1964

text · folklore

■

Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me — Bruce Jackson, Harvard University Press, 1974

text · folklore

■

The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism — Henry Louis Gates Jr., Oxford University Press, 1988

text · scholarship

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