I’m also half-Polish. (My mother is 120% Polish … if you know any Polish women, you’ll understand that the math adds up.) I laughed my ass off at a couple of the Polack jokes told upthread.
Living in Texas, I can confirm the Aggie jokes are popular, as are “people from Oklahoma” variants.
Having light colored hair, I am quite familiar with dumb blonde jokes - a couple of them are truly hysterical - so I guess I hit a trifecta of target groups. You’re right that it’s knowing your audience and reading the room. If we cool, you’ll have me rolling with laughter. But we gotta be cool …
(- Why do brunettes tell blonde jokes?
This mis-characterizes the situation. It’s not like all jokes that make fun of other groups start off as polaque jokes and are then transmuted. From the part of the country I grew up hearing lots of derogatory and racist jokes none of which were polish and none which would be transferable to polish people.
As a native Texan I heard a lot of these too but I don’t think these really belong in this group. Aggies are no different in any way than any other Texan. They just chose a different school to attend. They are not targeting their race, color, religion, sexual preference etc.
Yup. I grew up in Florida where we told Florida-Florida State jokes. Where I live now, it’s Alabama-Auburn jokes.
“If you have more A’s on your pickup truck than you ever got in school, you might be an Alabama fan.”
Incidentally my Dad grew up in Chicago in the 50s and 60s and always told us kids about the ethnic-based ribbing that went on in his neighborhood. He definitely knows and has told his share of Polack jokes.
That was sort of the point. This type of joke generally has little, if anything, to do with actual characteristics of the target group. It just targets a member of an outgroup and makes an absurdly exaggerated statement about them. The absurdity of the exaggeration is the mechanism for triggering surprise, and making the absurdity about an outgroup makes the surprise non-threatening to members of the ingroup. Non-threatening surprise is a common element in humor.
What has changed is the “non-threatening” part. Our society has at least begun to recognize that targeting outgroups for verbal abuse isn’t actually harmless. It’s a cultural corrosive. That change in attitude is why the jokes are increasingly regarded as offensive, rather than funny.
Yeah - that should be more consonants. My last name ends in “ski”. My wife’s dad is proudly 100% bohunk. I remember at our wedding, my best man’s speech said something like, “For chrissakes, buy a vowel, guys!”
My youngest daughter “10-letters ski” is engaged to a “9-letters sky.” I told them they’ve GOTTA hyphenate!
One of my sisters married a guy from downstate IL, and they moved to St Louis. At some point she commented that her husband’s family just couldn’t get over the names of folk from up in Chicago. In Chicago, everyone was Polish, or Italian, or German, or whatever. Further down state everyone had Anglo names like Anderson, Smith, Harper…
“Longhorn and Aggie” jokes aren’t even that original. Here in Washington State, there are “Husky and Cougar” jokes. In Oregon, there are “Duck and Beaver” jokes. Every state that has an urban-based university and a rural-based university has these.
I had a copy of an omnibus collection. Polish jokes, Italian jokes, Mexican jokes; it even had jokes for ethnicities not commonly made the butt of such jokes, like Native Americans and Scots (or, if they were, not where I grew up). Being a Scottish-slash-Czech American, I was delighted to find jokes about both my heritages:
His da gives wee Jock 50p to get the bus to school every day. One day, Jock decides to run behind the bus and save the siller. He comes home and excitedly tells his da: “I rin behind th’ bus and savit 50p!” His da slaps him on the head and says “Ye lazy wee gouk! Why did ye no rin behind a cab and save twa pun?!”
Yeah. In Georgia (at least among UGa fans) we tell Florida jokes:
Why do Gators wear orange? Because it’s the perfect color for them; they can wear it to go squirrel hunting on Friday, wear it to the game on Saturday, then wear it for their community service picking up trash on the highway on Monday.
I imagine these types of jokes are fairly interchangeable. I’ve no doubt Florida fans tell similar ones about Bulldogs. Georgia Tech fans tell “dumb redneck” jokes about us:
What does a Georgia grad call a Tech grad, ten years after college?
“Boss.”
“If your go to response to any sort of criticism about anything on your side of the political aisle is to cry about liberals,…yoooooouuuuuu might be a redneck.” -J. Foxworthy
Didja hear about the Sooner who stopped in a College Station bar and said to the bartender, “Do you know how many Aggies it takes to change a tire on a pickup?”
The bartender said “Well, see that guy at the table over there? He’s a linebacker for the Aggie football team. The guy he’s drinkin’ with? He’s a bass drum player for the Fightin’ Aggies Marching Band. The guy on the mechanical bull who had been riding it for the past 10 minutes? He is a member of the Aggie wrestling team. You think you want to finish that joke?”
The Sooner says, “Naw, I don’t feel like tellin’ it 3 times.”
Wow, what are you on about? Are Black people different than White people? In the respect that this thread addresses, hell yes! Their ancestors were slaves and they have been traditionally discriminated against in almost all facets of American life. Question: name a word that a black person could call you that be as hurtful as the N-word would be to them. Now tell me why you can’t.
Cripes, is right. I’m all for fighting racism but I don’t need to invent it just to feel better about myself. Blonde jokes target all and only blondes, polish jokes target all and only “polocks”. Aggies come from all socio-economic strata and backgrounds. They are male, female, black, white, rich, poor, weak, strong.
Look you may not agree with me that Aggie jokes are not as harmful as, say, black jokes. Fine. But don’t pretend that when it comes to insulting people we are all the same. That’s an ignorant position.
For the record regardless of my stance on this issue I don’t and never have told these types of ‘jokes’.
The point isn’t different levels of racism of whatever. The point is that for most of these jokes, the target group is interchangeable. Take a “dumb Polack” joke, change one word, and you got yourself a “dumb blonde” joke. Swap a regional detail, and you can tell an Aggie or Gators joke.
I don’t regard people as all the same. For example, I don’t regard you as the same as me: I’m culturally American only up to grade school level. One of the differences between me and you is that you see everything through the prism of race. I don’t claim that you think it’s funny: I just say that it comes as a shock to see it.