You Joking Me?

I agree with you.

I hear people say both all the time. While it is true that what your friend says is more colloquial, your alternative is still colloquial as well, despite being a little more "proper," so I don't think either is much more "wrong" than the other.

Also, you would probably never use either in any type of writing unless it's in dialogue, so there's really not an issue of which is more correct anyway.

Actually, you can "joke" someone.

"joke, v.

...

2. trans. To make the object of a joke or jokes; to poke fun at; to chaff, banter, rally."

--from the online OED

Yes, I've heard "You've gotta be joking me." From a descriptive POV, I don't think we can say it is right or wrong. It's right for the dialect of the person saying it. My grandmother (not a native speaker of English, but she learned to speak English) used to say, "I just joshing you." :-)

Your question is about the use of the word "gotta", as opposed to "have". Gotta is a colloquial contraction of the verbal phrase "have got to," an idiom. Therefore, your friend's sentence becomes, "You have got to be joking."

Cheers

They are both so awful why even discuss it?

What's awful? They seem perfectly reasonable to me, although I have never heard "joking" used transitively before. Is that a Southern thing, maybe?

Rufus, after two years, you're probably no longer checking this thread, but "gotta" is NOT a contraction of "have got to". It is only a contraction of "got to".
You've gotta... = you have got to....
You gotta... = you got to....

I burst out laughing (or perhaps I should say I Iolled) when I read Anonymous's "correction" of Rufus, saying 'gotta' was a contraction of 'got to', not 'have go to', giving the examples:

You've gotta... = you have got to....
You gotta... = you got to...

'You got to ...' is ungrammatical of course, at least in Standard English. And if someone uses 'gotta', are they really going to bother with the 've? - surely it would be something like 'I gotta go', or from my generation - 'I gotta split, man'. (which is perhaps a little ambiguous!)

When I checked a couple of dictionaries, sure enough 'gotta' was defined as "the written form of the word some people use to mean ‘have got to’ or ‘have got a’, which is not considered to be correct". An example of the latter being 'Gotta cigarette? (= Have you got a cigarette)'. Which by Anonymous's reasoning would presumably be (= Got a cigarette?) - which we do say, but is itself an ellipsis of 'Have you got ...'.

And I was thinking of some examples when I realised that there's one case where Anonymous might unknowingly (I suspect) have a point. The well-known expression 'A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do' had just come into my mind, and here indeed we have one construction, third person singular, where 'gotta' does in fact mean 'got to' - 'He's gotta go now'. But one person out of six doesn't really make a rule.

I have a friend from Minnesota who has a plethora of improper common catch phrases.
"Are you joking me?" (*Kidding)
"I borrowed her twenty dollars." (*Lent)
He also calls a video game console a "counsel". The way to structures his sentences drive me up the wall. What is worse is that he believes he is correct for the most part because "Everyone from Minnesota talks that way"... How can this be? He thinks I am being ridiculous and I have to prove myself correct. I guess it is safe to say avoiding Minnesota and former Minnesota residents is advisable.

Another abuse of the English language together with 'would of' 'we was', 'you was', 'stadiums', 'criterias' and many, many more.

Personally, I use “Are you kidding me?” and I die a little inside every time someone uses “joking” in its place; I guess they’re both grammatically incorrect so...

Yes! You're absolutely 100% correct! I can't stand when people say "are you joking me?". They sound so illiterate. The word joking, is an action; but it's an action that cannot be performed on another person. You can joke WITH someone, but you cannot joke them!

"You gotta be joking me" is fine to use in conversation considering the casual & informal nature of the phrase. The use of "joking" instead of "kidding" here makes the phrase sound funnier and has a more aloof, goofy tone, which is the reason it's used.

P.S. To the more die-hard prescriptive commenters in this thread... it's really strange to be so @nal about this type of colloquial speech. This is not an essay, this is not a law, this is not a scientific report; this is banter with friends. Dancing around the rules of book grammar in these types of conversations is perfectly reasonable!

@ByteMega
No sorry, the part phrase “joking me” is an abomination, totally incorrect and people using it should be beaten with a dictionary. I understand languages are transformative but for goodness sake, warping the rules like this and “being ok” with it is just limp wristed and a cop out.