The UNCF still very much exists, and that’s still their slogan. But, I don’t know how much they advertise anymore, so I have no idea how visible they are to younger people.
I didn’t know what a Polack was when those jokes began circulating. My dad told me it meant a Polish person. I knew then they were mean-spirited and just a false stereotype. All us kids repeated them, but I don’t think any of us thought for a minute that Polish people were any different from anyone else. When the blonde jokes started up about ten years later I didn’t know anyone who really thought about blondes that way either.
I wonder if Dan Quayle’s unintentionally hilarious mangling of the motto is known by young people.
What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
Unlikely, I’d imagine, except maybe for younger people who are students of politics (and 1980s/1990s politics, at that). Quayle uttered that botched line 37 years ago now, and other than a brief run at the GOP presidential nomination in 1999 (dropping out months before the first primaries in 2000), he’s not really been particularly visible in public life since leaving office in 1993.
There were a lot of ethnic jokes at the time. I recall one company published a series of ethnic joke books, so everyone could be offended. Or maybe they just wanted to print Polack jokes, but did the other ethnicities as protective coloration.
So jokes about white-out would still work if the person you’re telling the joke to worked in one of those small shops that handwrites their financial documents.
Otherwise, nope.
I’m not sure how a joke like this would work.
What do call Dolly Parton floating on her back in the river? Islands in the Stream.
I’m thinking that she is now known more as her as a person, rather than a couple of physical characteristics.
Any joke based on the premise “If a man is circumcised, he must be Jewish.”
I’m not so sure. At least in the USA circumcision had become nigh universal by the 1960s and is now heading back down. I doubt it’ll get (back?) to being a Jewish-only thing, but I would not be surprised to learn that 20-30 years from now it had become quite rare for non-Jewish infants to be circumcised.
FTR: I’m indifferent to the practice; this isn’t a hobby horse for me like it is for some.
Going back to disaster jokes, one of my faves was another Challenger joke:
Q: What kind of teacher was Christa McAuliffe?
A: Science. But by noon she was history.
Although back in the day I also liked the AIDS joke about convincing your Mom you’re Haitian. Which was cited upthread.
Plus, the song’s over forty years old.
Q: “Fee Fi Fo, Fee Fi Fo Fum?”
A: Mike Tyson’s phone number.
Depending on your generation with respect to something really obvious:
"Even [Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder] could see that!
I don’t know how well known either of those might be to under-40s, and I don’t know of a contemporary well-known blind person.
What did they call the tennis match between Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder?
Endless Love.
I remember when comedians could get a laugh pretty much by saying the words “mother-in-law.” Example – possibly from Henny Youngman – “What’s the penalty for bigamy?” “Two mothers-in-law.”
“Yuppie” jokes died a slow death in the 90s as the concept of spending one’s young adulthood as a high-earning urban professional lost whatever novelty it once had. (Perhaps in 40 years we’ll be saying the same thing about “tech bro” jokes.)
I never really understood WHY Polish jokes were popular (not really knowing anything about the history of Poland). Having visited Poland a few years back, the main defining feature I could see was that the women all looked like various sizes of Maria Sharapova and then men all looked like extras from a Liam Neeson action movie.
Totally. Even as a ten-year-old in 1980 — peak Polack-joke immersion — it seemed to me an odd choice for derision.
Let’s chalk it up to envy!
That happened to me this week. I was playing a word game with a younger crowd and we were trying to get one person to figure out the secret word, which was peanut. And the one word clue I gave was Linus. And he had no idea what the connection was between Linus and peanut.
In my defense, somebody else gave the clue gallery, which is an even more outdated reference. He didn’t get that one either.
Allan Sherman had a gag that went something like this:
“This is the year 5726 in the Jewish calendar, but 4662 in the Chinese calendar. That means that for 1,064 years, Jews had to do their own laundry.”
The joke depends on understanding that Chinese laundries used to be a thing, and that many Jews used them. As others above have mentioned, in the 1960s, this was probably true only in New York City, Miami Beach, and a few other large American cities.
(FYI, the years above are correct for 1966.)