Why are Polish people often satirized as being dumb?
My mother was mostly Polish. And she could speak two languages. Plus she practically remodeled our whole house.
So why are they (seriously or half-seriously) portrayed as dumb?
:):):)
It’s not satire. It’s racism.
You may as well ask why people call black or Irish people dumb. The point is to cast Polish people as a sub-human group that it is okay to discriminate against and treat poorly.
It’s a joke, not satire.
Same reason people joke about (not satirize) blondes, or Texas Aggies. There are jokes that need butts, and there are all sorts of butts that can be used, often for the same joke.
Well okay, maybe they are satirizing the Aggies.
I’m not sure what distinction you’re trying to draw here. Many people do believe in racist stereotypes - stupid Polish/Irish/blacks, stingy Jews, etc. Given those beliefs, it’s satire to exaggerate those traits in mockery and ridicule.
Polish is a race now?
My WAG is that it was when there were a lot of Polish immigrants coming in who didn’t speak much English and so were stigmatized as stupid. Like many immigrants who couldn’t speak English, they tended to take menial jobs, at least at first, which was further evidence to those who wanted to think they were lesser people. I don’t know why the Poles were picked out more than other eastern Europeans, like Russians for example, except maybe that there were more of them.
Americas largest ethnic group are/were Germans and Germans make fun of Poles. It then diffused into the general population.
I think that’d be it. Every country has a stereotypical “dumb neighbour” - the English make fun of the Irish, the French mock the Belgians and the Swiss, etc… the jokes are mostly the same, only the target changes.
(btw, my favourite one is “Why do Belgians always swim at the bottom of the swimming pool ? Because deep down, they’re not all that dumb”)
“Beginning in the last years of the 19th century, anthropologists in the West accepted race theories, and many believed that the health of the human race depended upon the preservation of “racial purity.” The same applied to Germany. When this thinking even became a field of academic research, Nazi hatred of “the non-German races” found very fertile ground in which it could take root.” (source)
Moved to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Only for the people who let Merriam-Webster decide what words mean.
Or the Oxford English Dictionary:
If you’re one of those types, then Polish is a race. Otherwise, I guess you get apply your own restrictions to what words mean.
I’d say it’s a combination of these two things. German Americans (and eventually Italian Americans, Irish Americans, etc.) who had been in the U.S. longer than Polish immigrants, who were less familiar with the language and customs.
They’re not really Polish jokes, so much as Polish *immigrant *jokes.
Yes, in the same way as Hispanic is. “Race” can refer to two different things, which back when the world was larger used to be much more parallel than they are now: ancestry and culture. You’re thinking that it means “a certain set of physical traits”; that’s linked to but not equal to the ancestry definition. So is referring to Americans of Polish descent as “Polish”.
I certainly get the picture that Germans tend to make fun of Poles – analogous, in the department of “regrettable but sometimes humorous national stereotypes” to the English vis-a-vis the Irish: that is, the fun-makers’ perceivedly less-bright and less-organised neighbour nation. Have also seen it suggested that in the US, the “dumb Poles” thing arose in part, via Polish-Jewish immigrants to the States. With, sadly, many centuries of “Polish (i.e. Slavic) Poles” and their Jewish neighbours, not getting on well together – Polish Jews were apt to console themselves by regarding their majority non-Jewish compatriots as not very clever; and to think up comical tales on that theme. It would seem fair to say that the Jewish community there as a whole, would have been more into “the life of the mind” than most of their Gentile neighbours.
That’s the way I’d heard it too. The “new wave” of immigration always caught crap, and then gave it to the “next wave.”
I wish I could recall where I heard it, as a reference, something makes me think its some Issac Asimov non-fiction?
At any rate, the Scots-Irish caught it when they first started arriving in pre-Revoultionary times. Ironically, when Swedish and Nordics arrived afterward, they didn’t face much stigma. But those “others” – from the Mediterranean areas of Europe, what with their garlic and tomato eating olive oil using ways, those people were awful. But people just told the same jokes, they didn’t even update the jokes for ethnicity.
The question is, why are we sticking with Polish jokes after all the newer waves of immigration. Maybe its because of the ease of publication – now we write durable joke books, instead of yellow paper rags, so the joke can’t be transferred. Or that the “Border Wall” talk has made the new wave of immigration “serious business.”
The stereotypes in the Godfather or other mafioso movies doesn’t bother me, but it does bother some members of my family. For me, I get kinda pissed off when I watch episodes of Two Broke Girls – with the characters of Oleg and Sophie. Now, the actors hit the accents perfectly, and that makes their situations they depict all the more egregious – aren’t we past making fun of Europeans? Note: these examples don’t depict the foreigner as stupid, they just have other negative traits. So I guess we are past that.
This question seems to come up often. I wonder why. Is it that some people are comfortable with being identified as bigots so long as they can argue that “technically, I’m not a racist, because the group I’m bigoted against isn’t a race, according to my narrow definition of the word.”
That’s my take on it.
I haven’t heard derogatory comments about Polish people in a long time, in the 70s it was common how openly bigoted people would be about the Polish. Polish jokes were a thing and it was pretty socially accepted. It’s just bigotry and you can’t make much sense out of the why of it, some people want to feel better about themselves by crapping on other people.
I, too, thought “satirize” was the wrong word for what the OP was referring to. In my experience, Polish jokes aren’t meant to point out how dumb Polish people are; they just take that as a premise for the sake of the joke.
But then, I don’t think I’ve heard any Polish jokes since the 1970s.
Good point, which would explain the popularity of West Virginia jokes, since West Virginian definitely isn’t a race.
My dad was born in Chicago in 1920. I was born in Chicago in 1960. Our last name ends in “ski,” but we had no recent immigrants in our tree.
Growing up, I heard and told a million Polack jokes. Shared them with my dad. He said that when he as young, the same jokes were told about Bohemians.
Q: You know why so many Bohunks survived the Stock Market Crash?
A: You can’t kill yourself jumping out of a basement window!
(Oh yeah - the stereotype immigrant would buy a 2 flat, rent out the top 2 floors and live in the basement.)
Haw haw! I got a MILLION of 'em! 