This doesn’t explain anything, I’m sure, but I did once hear a ‘joke’ that went:
Why do the Polish have hunched shoulders and sloped foreheads?
Because when you ask them a question they shrug and say ‘I don’t know’, and when you tell them the answer they slap their foreheads.
Are hunched shoulders and sloped foreheads common among Poles/Polacks/Polaks?
Don’t know about that, but I heard the same joke about Italians and others.
They’re still telling Polish jokes? I haven’t heard a Polish joke in decades. Polish heritage people are so spread out across the US these days, and often are reasonably well off, educated and/or accomplished, that the meme/joke has utterly no resonance.
I think the “dim ethnic” joke fo a lot of immigrant communities is based on the fact that the recent wave did not speak English well, plus the likely immigrant workers were from the less educated class. The typically reaction to “I have to explain it to them slowly and clearly in small words” is “they must be stupid” rather than “Gee, maybe they don’t speak English”.
I assume the polish joke thingprobably originated from the very large polish community in Chicago, one of the larger cities in the USA. Likely the others (LA, NYC) did not have one single minority that were as obvious a target.
Other posters have pointed out that there are other Polish names used for police officers, but then there is Against the Wall, a Lifetime series about a family of police officers: Don Kowalski; Donnie Kowalski; Steve Kowalski; Richie Kowalski; and Abby Kowalski, which kind of makes up for it.
My WAG:
Polack jokes in the U.S. began, as noted, in locations with large Polish immigrant populations. I suspect that they expanded out into the rest of the U.S. when comics and comedians from Chicago and Detroit, (and, perhaps, Buffalo and Pittsburgh, but Chicago and Detroit both contributed a lot of writers to Hollywood), began telling the same jokes in national venues. I remember being quite surprised to hear a Polish joke on Laugh-In in the very late 1960s, because even then I recognized them as rather local. Once they had a national venue, however, they were simply a bit self-perpetuating. At that time, jokes against blacks had become far less acceptable on national venues and the shift to Poles possibly seemed “safe.” A number of jokes got a boost with either visual links, (a poster of a geezer dressed in WWI togs with a banner declaring that the Polish Air Force would protect us), or urban legends that were accepted as accurate, E.g.:
During WWII, the references to Poles were not that they were stupid, but that they were crazy/brave–particularly in references to pilots who had fled Poland and joined the RAF, but also in reference to Polish-Americans on ships or in the infantry.
There was a large Finnish immigrant community in the Upper Pennsula of Michigan and many of them moved into Minnesota following the iron ore mining companies, making them a typical target community for (immigrant) ethnic jokes in both locations.
Ouch. Point taken.
Like many other immigrant communities, Poles used self-denigrating humor, often as a way to avoid confrontation while integrating into a new society. Poles, perhaps lacking distinquishing physical features from other northern Europeans receieved the default stereotype, stupidity. In many cultures there is some group of people categorized with a lack of intelligence. For Poles in America, this may have been influenced by attitudes carried over from Europe. I’ve encounter Russians who make jokes about Poles.
I’ve long felt that the jokes about Polish immigrants being stupid resulted in large part from their being unable to speak English, or any of the Germanic or Romance languages. Americans pretty much felt that anyone who couldn’t umnderstand you – even if you used all your foreign language training on them – must not be very bright. At least with French or German or Italian people you’d have some familiarity with the language, or some similar-sounding words or phrases you knew. But Polish didn’t share those, and had lunatic spelling, to boot.
It didn’t help that a lot of the Polish immigrants were basically peasants, and so didn’t have crafts and skills and exposure to things beyomnd their home villages. There’s a great scene in James Michener’s novel Poland where he describes a visiting Polish nobleman being brought to a polish festival in Chicago, and wondering why his American hosts brought him to these uncultured, unlettered peasants.
All four of my grandparents came to the US from what had been, at omne time, Poland. My grandmothers hadn’t traveled much beforehand, didn’t speak a word of English at first (and barely knew any when they died), abnd tended to only associate with other Polish emigres. One of my grandmothers got a job cleaning floors at the Waldorf-Astoria (the one where the Empire State Building now stands), and lost it when she plunged her hands into a bucket of ammonia. She had no idea what it was, having never encountered it. Her employer undoubtedely thought “stupid Polish Girl”. She scalded the skin from her hands and coukln’t wash floors until they healed – and that was the sum total of her employable skills. A tregedy for her.
She learned how to sew and moved out into a suburb where a cliothing factory was. And where she met my grandfather. And so, ultimately, I came to be.
That sobered my chuckling about an upthread funny typo and a misspelling.
Excellent post…
I espouse the theory that the polish stereotype derives ultimately from complex analysis humour, with its plethora of “simple pole” jokes.
Speaking as a third-generation Chicagoan of Polish descent, the best “dumb Pollack” jokes were always the ones told by my extended family and Polish neighbors. 
While I’m certain there were, and are, some Polish-Americans who have been offended by Polish jokes, I never met any. Which lends credence to the “self-deprecation” angle to the humor, at least in later generations. Things were probably different when they were newly immigrated, but second-, third- and beyond generation Polish-Americans never struck me as getting all worked up over dumb Pollack jokes.
I tend to agree with CalMeachem’s post RE: the average English-speaking ability of just-off-the-boat Polish immigrants. My childhood was spent in a neighborhood full of recent Polish emigres from the 1970s and 1980s, and lemme tell ya, you’ve never heard someone sound dumber than a Polish immigrant trying to speak English for the first time. Of course, that doesn’t mean they are dumb-- it’s just something about the language and the accent that sounds surprisingly incompatible with intelligence. Unfair and bigoted to be sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those first generations of Poles to America suffered far worse in their time because of it.
Anyway, I love Polish jokes, never once been offended by any. They remind me of all my Uncles swearing in Polish and ridiculing their dumb neighbors. It’s a shame that the march of time (and our P.C. culture) has relegated such a rich vein of cultural humor to the trash-heap.
If you make jokes about an oppressed minority, you are a bigot an mean spirited.
If you have a minority that is not really suffering oppression, yet has identifiable characteristics, it makes for good natured humor. There are probably Lutherans offended by Garrison Keillor, but not the ones I know…if anything they ham it up with his stereotypes.
A few years ago I worked with a guy who’d emigrated from Poland to the US about three years prior. He’d never heard of phenomenon before he moved here, and seemed pretty amused by it. I admitted that I’d grown up (in suburban Chicago) hearing Polack jokes all the time, but had no idea why they were singled out.
I think the “dim Polack” vein of ethnic humour is on its way into history.
What is interesting to me, as an aside, is to come across examples of ethnic humor and stereotyping which have become so obsolete they are all but forgotten.
A good example of this is the “dumb Swede”. Around the turn of the last century, it was widely held that Swedish people were inherently ignorant and gullable. This has pretty well vanished to the point that jokes and stories based on the “dumb Swede” make no sense. An example of this is the poem by Robert Service of that name, in which a “dumb Swede” turns the tables on his tormentors.
When I moved from suburban Chicago to Green Bay as a kid, I stopped hearing Polish jokes, and started hearing Belgian jokes.