He may not have had any hits lately, but Stevie Wonder is still a contemporary blind person.
FWIW:
Poles in Milwaukee Started Jokes
In Milwaukee for 30 years a feud has been going on between north side and south side Polacks. That is where the Polack jokes started. I was raised as a north side Polack.
In 1944 when we visited Milwaukee, Polack jokes were rampant. No one took offense.
This July, one of my sons and his family visited me. We had the neighborhood teenagers in when my wife and son started on Polish jokes.
Maybe, just maybe, we were responsible for bringing some so-called offensive jokes to Omaha. If so, we are truly sorry.
Mrs. Arthur J. Ackeret.
–Evening World Herald, Oct. 11, 1965, Omaha NE
Sad to say, we (me, at least) did.
You see there were three primary ethnic group in central Wisconsin: Germans (the best, and they’d let you know it! Mostly by telling polack jokes.), Poles (see: Germans), and the rest of us. It was good to not be the butt of jokes all the time when you are 8. I probably thought Poles were dumb. It’s easy to be indoctrinated at a young age. I even told polack jokes. I grew out of it.
Fast forward 40 years, we get a new engineer here, from Wisconsin, name ends in “ski”. He says, “no polish jokes!” I immediately go, “These two polacks went ice fishing…” (no further)*. We hit it right off!
They were funny. What did we know at that age from causing emotional pain and micro aggression.
*the joke is funny. “Two guys” is funny enough without the ethnic putdown, but I sometimes tell it “Two guys, in Wisconsin, they’d be Poles, to Poles, they’d be two Minnesota Norwegian bachelor farmers **, in Minnesota, they’d be two Canadians, in Canada, they’d be two French Canadians…anyway they go ice fishing…”
**named, of course, Sven and Ollie
A variation:
A Jewish man and a Chinese man are talking about history. The Chinese man says, “My people have been around for 4000 years”.
The Jewish man says, “Oh yeah? Well my people have been around for 5000 years”.
The Chinese man says, “Really? What did you eat for the first thousand years”.
It refers to the stereotype of Jewish people liking Chinese food. A Jewish girl I dated claimed it was because most restaurants are closed on Christmas (and other Christian holidays) but most Chinese restaurants are open, because the owners are often not Christian.
The original sense of the verb glaze is to literally “add glass to something”. As in, put a piece of glass in the window. And the original sense of the word window is literally a “wind eye”. Which meant that once you’ve put glass in the window, it’s not actually a window any more, but a transparent wall. (Originally a waw, since a wall was a fortification, not the side of a building. Prescriptivists have been losing their fights for a long time.)
The common connotations of these words have changed significantly…
And in Green Bay, there were (still are) a whole lot of Belgians, to the point that, when I was a kid, “Polish jokes” were usually reskinned as “Belgian jokes.”
We had a recent spate of burglaries in our county, dude caught on various Ring cameras. He was doing it in the nude. Which led to predictable jokes about the police lineup when they catch him (“Number four, step forward and drop trou!”); a Jewish friend added, “Did he look Jewish?” to the mix.
Cops did catch the guy, no word on whether a lineup was necessary!
I collect technologically obsolete jokes. Those are jokes that are completely un-funny nowadays because they make no sense any more due to technology changes. They are NOT topical like most of the jokes here, i.e.., not based on current events/celebrities.
One: woman tells the milkman, “I’m supposed to take a milk bath, so I need ten gallons tomorrow.” “Pasteurized?” “No, just up to my chin.”
(Milkman? Milk bath?? Pasteurization optional??? OK, that last one is sorta coming back with the “raw milk” craze, but still)
Another: phone rings, small child answers. “Is your daddy home?” “No.” “Well, do you know how to write?” “Yes.” “Then can you take a message?” “OK.” “Thanks. Please tell him to call Mr. Jones at CApital 5-1234.”
(Small child home alone? No answering machine/voicemail?? Kid answers phone??? And most of all, of course, the word-based NX in the NXX???)
Long silence, then: “I don’t know how to make a capital five!”
One more: Family eating dinner, phone rings, maid answers, listens, says “Sure is!” and hangs up. This repeats twice more. Finally the master of the house asks WTF; she says, “Some joker keeps calling and telling me ‘Long distance from New York’!”
(Family eating dinner together? Maid?? Long distance being a big deal???)
More likely Newfies, no? Though making fun of Quebecois is always legit (in the other nine provinces…ok, maybe not so much in New Brunswick).
nm / duplicate post
Fa ra ra ra ra.*
It’s a beautiful duck.
*yes, another ethnic based putdown. Come on, despite the name, you just know Ralphie’s family were Polish. 
Still with phones …
I’m sure there were plenty of party line jokes back when everyone knew what a party line was.
Then, in the 900 number era just before the www took off, “party line” took on a whole new meaning. 
Now? Just baffled looks all around.
What did the Pink Panther say when his mom’s sister passed away?
Dead aunt, dead aunt, dead aunt dead aunt dead aunt, dead aunt dead auuunnnnnnt, wah wah wah wah wah.
Also, dairy is uncommon in Chinese food, so the restrictions against milk + meat won’t be an issue.
Subject: phones, lightning storms, and silly farmers
Back in the day when I was a Wisconsin agriculturist, we used to subscribe to the Wisconsin Agriculturist. There was a comic strip every issue about a farm family. One I still remember was that they were getting a phone call in a lightning storm, and the wife tells the husband to hold a toothpick to protect him from a lightning strike on the phone lines (an actual risk, not actual remedy!).
To this day I don’t know what was funny. Were we supposed to laugh at the naive wife and her fold remedies? Ok, marginally funny. Or we were supposed to take it as actual advice to follow? Not funny.
And now while the farmers may still have landlines, they all have cell phones. No one is talking during a lightning storm. They’re all out filming it with their cell phones.
Where does the Lone Ranger take his garbage?
To da dump, to da dump, to da dump dump dump…
In between the time that Kareem Abdul Jabbar rose to fame with the Lakers, appeared as co-pilot Roger Murdock in Airplane!, and subsequently retired, there has been a football player - also named Karim Abdul Jabbar - who played college ball for UCLA (much like the other Kareem, although in a different sport), rose to prominence playing for Miami, got traded, and has also since retired!
It’s been over 40 years, but we still laugh and joke about Kareem’s Scene in Airplane!. In fact, at our first Christmas, my wife and I each unknowingly bought the other a copy of Airplane on DVD!
We’re also huge Jeopardy! fans, so we laughed extra-hard when Kareem flubbed the question about his own role in Airplane! on Celebrity Jeopardy.
They’re not in airports anymore, but I do occasionally encounter groups of Krishnas doing the dance-and-chant thing in the street. They’ve never offered me a flower but sometimes I get invited to a vegan meal (which I have not taken them up on).
But both their ubiquity and usefulness as joke fodder has certainly long faded.
But fewer than George Formby (speaking of old jokes that don’t work anymore).
As immortalized in the Benny Hill song “Ernie, The Fastest Milkman In The West”. Of course, everything Benny Hill-related is also obsolete so maybe not so immortalized.
I rewatched Airplane! recently because ZAZ released a book on the making of the movie and talking about where all the gags came from. (titled, inevitably, Surely You Can’t Be Serious. Not only were many of them about current events, the male cast was picked mostly because they were so familiar in dramatic television series, so the contrast was greater. As with Barbara Billingsley, all that surprise is lost today.
If you didn’t know - and I didn’t - the jive scene was written by the two actors who played the roles.
Monty Python is also filled with references to current events and people; worse, from American perspectives, British events and people.
That’s so “Gift of the Magi.”
I always note when people make remarks like this. When they say “people didn’t used to get offended by those jokes” what they really mean is “people who were the subjects of those jokes used to be afraid to express any offense.”
If a woman expressed offense at a joke about women, she’d get slapped. If a gay man expressed offense at a joke about homosexuality, he’d get beaten up. If a black person expressed offense at a joke about black people, he’d get arrested and maybe lynched. That’s the reality of the “good old days”.