If you’re doing a jokey “lookit me, I’m speaking ebonics” bit, keep in mind that neglecting to conjugate the word “be” would be entirely inappropriate. You can’t just substitute “am”, “is”, or “are” for “be” and think that you have your comedic “hood” persona down pat. For instance, many of you might have your black guy say “I be angry, now”. However, that line would be better suited for a pirate than a modern day black person.
Here’s how the weird “be” thing that you hear black people do sometimes really works. “Be” basically connotes a regular occurance. For example, if someone says, “I be online”, he doesn’t mean that he’s on the internet right now, he means that he’s a regular web surfer. Or if he says “She be lying”, he’s not necessarily referring to something she just said, but to her ongoing character in general. That’s probably a hard thing to understand because standard English doesn’t have a tense like that ( according to this board) - you’d just have to use simple present to convey the same thing. That can be confusing though. “She lies” can either mean “She is lying” or “She lies, regularly”, but “She be lying” can only mean the latter.
You may be wondering what the point of getting all this right is when you’re just trying to make ridicule these people in the first place. Well, jokes that rely on the audience being ignorant make you look stupid when the audience isn’t ignorant. If I were trying to do a funny “British guy” impression by saying “I want to lick a few fags up in’nit”, I’d look like an obnoxious idiot, since it’s obvious I have no idea what those Britishisms mean. I’m really trying to help you out. Imagine how annoying a person would be if they did that dumb British bit all the time and you’ll realize my pain. It’s so irritating - I’ve never, ever seen a wiseguy get the “be” thing right. Even respected, “hip” comedians get this wrong (per Jon Stewart in America: The Book, pg 24: “Fuck with a mutherfuckah’s tea and the shit be on!” Uh, no).
Anyway, if you’re going to do a cliched “ebonics” bit, please, please try to understand the source material before you lampoon it.
Far be it from me to lecture a black person on black English, but he’s right, and it is annoying, and this coming from a white boy who couldn’t speak black English if my life depended on it. It still sounds fake and weird when comedians fuck up their black English jokes.
pizzabrat’s description of the use of the “be” verb in AAVE is correct. This is one of the more interesting and elegant features of AAVE from a linguistic perspective, and is a standard textbook example of how AAVE varies from many other American English dialects.
Although some dismiss AAVE as “sloppy English” or claim that it abandons all grammar, it does have its own rules and unique structures. People who don’t understand these rules cannot imitate the dialect correctly. Whether people feel it’s worthwhile to be able to imitate AAVE correctly is a personal call, but I can see poor imitations could get old real fast. Actually, I think genuine AAVE speakers are amazingly tolerant about this, especially considering how much flack they get for supposedly speaking English badly when they’re speaking their own dialect properly.
It would mean something more like “Why do you persistently tend to hate in the same way that you are hating right now?”