is that it is tribal. It has clans. Members have codes and taboos that cannot be bared in public. And they take on street names drawn from a more natural and gutturally symbolic world than tags like "Michael" and "Jerome" -- say, for example, "Big Tuna" and "Joe Bananas," both of whom were real-life mob figures. Or my all-time favorite, which actually comes from a film: "Jimmy the Cheese Man" from The Pope of Greenwich Village.
Youth gangs, similarly, dig into symbolism for identities that mean something beyond the often-disposable sound-gaming of American naming. Kids caught in a void of violent nihilism take on vividly personal handles for themselves and others: "Teeth," "Big Eye," "Snapper," "Sleepy." Names that say something about the bearer. The way that, say, some West African names do.
I think one of the most eloquent movie scenes ever is from the film Pulp Fiction, when Bruce Willis's fugitive boxer character tells a cab driver who remarks on his name, "I'm an American. My name doesn't mean shit."
Part of what mobs and gangs do is fill this selfhood void -- but with reactionary, racist, misogynist, fake "outlaw" outlets for American males, especially angry young males, for whom the vanilla concoction of shrink-wrapped American male identity means exactly nothing. Patriarchal capitalism has succeeded in alienating them from essence. Their substitute version of rawness, a kind of kamikaze fraternity, is their attempt at medicine for their ailment. It's a sick manifestation of a real desire.
None of that is the least bit funny. Still, there is something about the following rendition of Sesame Street's Ernie and Bert doing the classic Joe Pesci/Robert DeNiro desert scene from the Martin Scorsese film Casino that paints a perfect, hilariously absurd picture of this kind of cartoon barbarity:
(The trolls at YouTube have blocked direct embedding, but when "watch on YouTube" pops up, click it and you can watch it.)