Here in the USA, it’s not uncommon for late-night talk show hosts to make a quick jab at some other country, just for cheap laughs. You know, stuff that everyone knows is a stereotype and not really true, but makes you laugh anyway – the British have bad teeth, the French don’t bathe, the Japanese always take pictures of everything, that sort of thing.
What sort of jokes do other countries make about Americans?
That we’re fat, boorish, warmongers?
When I was in Canada, the common jokes were about the current presidents (Clinton, Bush) and then hockey (when, as I recall, both the US men’s and women’s teams lost Olympic medals to the Canuck teams).
I’m sure there others, mainly topical in nature… Oh, our higher drinking age (21, vs. 19 or 18 depending on province) was always a big one. And our laws/penalties on marijuana use.
I suppose the common joke stereotype here would suggest that Americans are all fat and loud. When in tourist mode, they’re dressed in tracksuits and festooned with cameras. As politicians they’re dumb and/or sleazy. And in general they’re all religious zealots.
I have met some Americans who conform to the stereotype. I have met many more who do not.
I once heard a news reporter on Australian radio decribe the term American intelligence (as in CIA for example) as the ultimate contradiction of terms.
Yeah. These days we have about as much credibility as Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf the former Iraqi Minister of Information. Kind of ironic, isn’t it?
There’s quite a bit of reasonably accessible American comedy out there. Consider the death scene near the end of “Monty Python’s Meaning of Life”
Quite a few other American stereotypes thrown into that, in fact into most of the Python movies. You could also try “A Fish Called Wanda”. Billy Connelly also does some good stand up stuff based on his experiences of America.
In general the stereotype of Americans is of pretentious phonies. Not necessarily boors or fools but of people full of bullshit who make a big deal out of everything and whose individualism leads them to acting as if there is nothing more important in the world than themselves and what is happening to them. They are inevitably loud and insincere. Basically the American stereotype is a combination used-car-salesman, game-show-host and sleazy politician with a vocabulary derived from bad pop-psychology texts and soap operas.
Oddly the fat American isn’t a stereotype I can ever recall seeing anywhere outside the US. Some Americans in humour are fat but no more often then anyone else.
I guess that you could say that the American joke stereotype would be Oprah or a hybrid of Dr. Phil and Jerry Springer. Pretentious, opinionated, loud and full of fake sincerity an melodrama.
Possibly because the fat problem has spread to most other western countries as well.
I did hear a good Canadian one about us once:
“How is American beer like sex in a canoe?”
“They’re both f—ing close to water!”
Ba-dump-bump. I believe one of the threads on here established that American and Canadian beers actually tend to have the same % of alcohol, but that’s the stereotype. (I find it additionally funny that a Canadian joke would presuppose knowledge of sex in a canoe… 
)
Reminds me of a good joke:
Ok, so there’s this hot blonde, a fat chick, a Canadian dude and an American dude riding on a train. The train goes through a tunnel, everything goes dark and they hear a “SLAP!” noise.
The train comes back into daylight and the American is rubbing his surprised face, thinking, “who slapped me?”.
The fat chick thinks to herself, “I bet that filthy American tried grabbing the blonde in the tunnel and she slapped him for it”.
The blonde thinks, “I bet that filthy American tried to grab me in the tunnel, but accidentally got the fat chick in the dark, and she slapped him for it”.
The Canadian thinks to himself, “Gee, I hope we go through another tunnel so I can slap that dumbass American again”.
Umm, hate to tell you this but that’s a Monty Python joke, in a skit where they posed as Australians.
I’m pretty sure the beer-canoe joke predates Python.
Some Japanese stereotyping:
In the anime Blue Seed, young psychics and paranormals work for the government to defend against Lovecraftian horrors.
One character is an American psychic. She’s a loud, obnoxious, self-obsessed, tastelessly-dressed self-promoting braggart who’s constantly on about how everything is bigger and better in the U.S. When her character is introduced, she enters a classroom as a new student, refuses to sit at a school desk because it’s hard and uncomfortable, and takes a self-inflating easy chair out of her purse, (commenting on how they’re disposable and no-one need ever be uncomfortable anywhere,) throws it down and inflates it, pushing several desks out of the rows. She then sits in it and starts talking loudly on the phone about how backwards the Japanese are, while the other students look on, scandalized and stunned.
I guess here it would be the gullible American tourist, totally ignorant of the country he is pasing through, dressed in brash plaids or wholly-unsuitable-for-the-weather clothing, easily parted from his money or sold an obviously fake historical artifact.
When Lake Havasu City, AZ bought the old London Bridge in the 1960s legend has it that they thought they were getting the one with the two towers that goes up and down in the middle. It’s the sort of thing we’d like to believe.
Fat, loud, obnoxious, completely ignorant about everything outside US borders (and most things inside them), assuming that everyone wants to move to the US as the citizens of all other countries are oppressed and denied the freedom Americans enjoy - I think that sums up the stereotypical American of comedy.
Oh, dear. Heard on the BBC no less:
A lot of Americans are obese.
The rest of them are. . .
OBESE
The thing that comes through most in the American stereotype that I have seen is how ignorant they are to the rest of the world. Some Americans live up to this stereotype, when in New York my brother was asked if they had electricity in Scotland, another example would be a conversation alleged to have taken place between Dubya and Charlotte Church, when she told him she was from Wales he asked her which state it was in (i’m not 100% sure this is a true story).
Another character trait I frequently see applied to the American tourist is a strong vein of arrogance, feeling that because they are American they are better than everyone else who lives in the country they visit.
Hell, in New York they don’t know that we have electricity in Oklahoma.
Not only are most Americans clueless about other countries, they’re clueless about other states.
Tho’ I’m mildly pro-American, I still chuckle over a bon mot on “Not the Nine O’Clock News” twenty-odd years ago, which was something along the lines of the Americans making up for being late for the first two World Wars by being really punctual for the next one.
There’s a thread right here in SDMB on English football (aka Soccer), the posters of which are mostly Britishers, I think, and they’re just as bad, just as provincial, just as xenophobic and supremely opinionated as we Americans are portrayed.
I posted in the thread, to ask a few questions about soccer, and then took the time to read the entire (up to then) thread.
In it, they complain of the outsiders who’ve been imported to the Premiership League - the shit Irish, shit Italians, shit French, and so on.
You get the impression that they regard all Americans are assholes, and they have this big, big thing about American hair, whatever the f— that is.
But down deep, I think we are all like this, no matter what country we come from. And despite the grumblings in that thread I mentioned, I firmly that Brits are wonderful people.
Bill Bryson kind of walked through England and wrote a wonderful book on his experiences. In it he tells how some outfit ( maybe a newspaper) conducted a survey and asked Brits just how special they thought they were - as a people. The answer came back: not special at all.
And these were the same folks who, in WWII, endured the V-1 and V-2 Rocket attacks, the incessant bombing raids, near famine, etc. And then, when one of their own Generals instituted the terrible fire bombing of Dresden and other German cities, the Brits were so outraged, they called for that man to be fired. And he was!!!
I so admire, and so love those folks.
Sorry, that joke predates Python. My Godfather told us that joke in the early 60’s.