My father also grew up in Chicago at that time and said the same thing.
He pointed out that “bohunks” (or “bohoes”) were any white person whose last name had more vowels than consonants - that type of humor not being particular about Czechs, Poles, Russians, Romanians, Hungarians, etc.
I never found much humor in Polish jokes - and the ones told in Poland aren’t any better.
“The mice are having a party. The English mouse retires early, saying: “I’ll finish my whisky and call it a night.” The French mouse says: “I’ll just have a cognac and take my mousetress to bed.” The German mouse downs his beer and says: “Now I must have a meeting with my neighborhood rodent association.” But the Polish mouse proclaims: “I will have a vodka and then I’ll have another vodka and then another vodka and then BRING ON THE CAT!”
*Had to fill in an inexplicable gap in the joke. Feel free to substitute your own interpretation of who the German mouse would be meeting with.
A Priest, a Minister and a Rabbi walk into a bar. The bartender takes one look at them and says
“We don’t server cliches here.”
My mother’s family’s Polish/Slovak, and we’ve told each other Polish jokes forever, called each other Polacks and Hunkys, etc. Lighten up!
Alternative endings for god-fearing patrons joke:
“Is this kind of a joke?”
“You some kind of a comedians?” (for Italian bar)
“We don’t serve your types. This is lesbian atheist bar!”
Aaaand one made up from the spot:
“Where is the Polack guy? Did he hit something?”
I knew an older guy who worked for another agency and he had a self appointed nickname of Polack.
I first met him in the early 80’s. There was a sizeable amount of people with Polish ancestry working in law enforcement at the time. I didn’t know of any of them that took offense at it if it was used as a term of endearment.
When he got closer to retirement his hearing dipped and he would sometimes not catch his number being called out over the radio. After a few attempts the dispatcher would finally call out “base to Polack” and he’d catch it. Not once did anyone listening on a scanner call in and complain.
And he always greeted you with a polish joke: “Hi, Gerome, how are you doing?”
Kowalski: “Polack airlines flight 13 came to a screeching halt at Warsaw International Airport. The Captain said it was the shortest runway he ever landed on. The co-pilot agreed and was incredulous as to how wide it was.”
He retired in the early 90’s and died in 1998.
I think it is kind of tasteless to be telling Polish jokes now, what with the Polish Air Force fighter jet crashing in that cemetary. So far 873 bodies have been recovered.
“If you tell the female nurse and doctor who are presently treating you that you are picturing them nekkid,…yooouuuu might be a redneck.” -J. Foxworthy
Shouldn’t that be “more consonants than vowels”? I mean, given the existence of Bohemian names like “Grbac”.
FWIW, I learned the word “bohunk” from my mother’s family. Who ultimately came from Ceske Budejovice.
Re to the word “Polack” - in the 17th century it was a neutral demonyn for “person from Poland”. Shakespeare used it as such in “Hamlet”:
Upon our first, he set out to suppress
His nephew’s levies, which to him appeared
To be a preparation ‘gainst the Polack. Hamlet, II.ii
My folks are both Polish-born-and-raised, and I grew up with my dad telling me the bulk of the Polish jokes I know. It’s a matter of know your audience and context. If somebody I don’t know approaches me and tells me a Polish joke, that may not come across well. If we’re friends or acquaintances that rib each other about our ethnicities (like Irish vs Polish), then that’s fine. I don’t have an issue with the word “Polack” so much, but it depends on who is saying it and how they’re saying it. (It is the Polish word for “Polish person”, polak.) For the most part, with people in my neighborhood, we razzed each other on our ethnicities, so it wasn’t a big deal. We all gave each other shit. Shit like, “What’s stupider than a Polack building a house underwater? A Mexican trying to burn it down.” Just non-sensical crap like that. But, outside this context, if I come across a Polish joke now – it’s odd.
As a (much) younger person, I knew many of them and would tell them. The one about the guy who won a gold medal in the Olympics. He was so proud he had it bronzed. The guy who left in the middle of the play because the program said: “Act Two-Two weeks later”, etc. Only once did anybody take offense, so I apologized and started repeating the joke…at a slower speed.
Racial/ethnic jokes were a staple in my crowd to, but the couldn’t be too biting. You knew where the line was.
I occasionally get together with a group of guys that I knew from Junior High school. These typically occur at a centrally located bar/eatery. Three of us arrived at the same time. Me, a white guy. And the other two being black and Puerto Rican.
As we walked into the bar, I was suddenly struck by the fact that we were a joke and shared this observation to much amusement.
If you’re contemplating suicide, a good way to go is to drink polish.
It’s a very painful death, but it gives you a great finish.
Man, some jokes just write themselves. 
While I agree I find it interesting that, on this board and in our country at large, comedians are often given a pass on this type of humor. I guess because they are professionals?
Polish jokes were originally promulgated by immigrant groups who had come here a generation or two earlier (Irish, Italian, etc.), to make fun of the ‘dumb’ immigrants who were less knowledgeable of American ways. They morphed into a codeword for any joke about a person being dumb or unsophisticated. Today, that person is more likely to be from West Virginia.
*Mad *magazine once showed a sign on a building in DC: “Polish Embassy, Joke Department”.
Also, an entry in a “Believe It Or Not” parody: “‘2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = infinity’ Submitted by Prof. Ignatz Wojekowski, University of Poland”.
Another punchline: "The bartender asks, “What is this, a joke?”
I am relieved of a lot of anxiety and depression after reading the posts about the Polaque jokes being transmutable.
However the point is people get targeted and abused.
After all, it isn’t much of a relief to know that you can simply slither from one ethnicity or race to the next by using the same dumb person jokes.
What really hurts is some of these jokes point to the fact a lot of Poles are not so much as dumb as they’re ignorant and stubborn. They call it defense of their culture.
Poland today is an abyss.
It’s deeply unfeeling and ignorant as seen in the example of this country and Hungary forcing the EU to withdraw the reference to the LGBTIQ community in a recent piece of legislation.
Worse yet, listening to Polish speakers on YouTube makes your heart sink, stomach churn because you just wonder where they get their intelligence from?
You wonder about their IQ score. Seriously.
It’s a tragic situation.
Poland is completely isolated and protectionist to the detriment of dialogue.
At best, Poles ape, mimick and parrot foreigners. Poles don’t learn nor enrich others through shared experiences.
They are easy prey for Anti-Polonists and polonophobia is on the rise in a place like Germany.
I don’t believe that changing the target of a dumb racist joke makes the teller less abusive and evil.
Why not just target the vulnerable LGBTQ people with the same old dumb jokes? Polish people try to shift the unwanted attention to homosexuals.
It would be wrong to as anyone normal realizes. The Poles have weakened themselves by giving into absurd regressive attitudes politically and culturally. Religiously too.
There’s nothing more funny than a man that’s fallen on the ground. Or is there?
In most circumstances they are hurtful but there are those rare cases like cousin Walter the Polack ------ hey, you marry into a family that is half Irish and half Siberian and you have to expect a nickname like that. He understands it as a sign of love because he knows us and our affection for him; he even plays along. Like telling us about the one summer when he was young and everyone kept calling him a dumb Polack; it wouldn’t have bothered him but he was visiting relatives in Krakow at the time. 
Once when he complained (not for real but just as a way of playing along) we went back to another old joke and started more along the line of “There were these two Hittites named Stash and Joe”. For us its a hug and that is how he feels it so I would call it no harm or foul in this usage.
Data point: when I was a wee lad in Wisconsin, Polak jokes were the norm. But they weren’t harmless.
I believed (in like first - third grade range) that “Polaks” were in fact stupider than the rest of us. The -ski contingent were much smaller than the German contingent in my class. Germans were the top, the rest of us were below, and the Poles at the bottom. Plus, (at that time) all the Polish kids were on the lower side of average in class performance. So I believed it to be true.
Who know how mean I may have come across to them.
This isn’t about targeting vulnerable people in protected classes. If Poland is in a sorry state today it certainly isn’t due to the fact that people tell polish jokes.
Different times, different values and sensibilities. Anyone remember the bestselling “Truly Tasteless Jokes” during the 1980’s? It actually spawned a whole series of books under that name filled with what was referred to back then as “off color humor”
I believe they had entire chapters devoted to Polack jokes