The top ten nation of origin of people’s ancestors in the U.S. today are these:
Germany
Mexico
Ireland
England
Italy
France
Poland
Scotland
Puerto Rico
Norway
(If all of the African continent were considered as a single nation of origin, it would rank second between Germany and Mexico.)
You couldn’t make jokes about the Germans, Irish, English, French, Scottish, or Norwegians because together they were more than half of Americans, and you didn’t want your snide jokes to be about the people you’re talking to. You also probably thought that they looked too much like you, so you couldn’t be sure you weren’t talking to them. At that point (say, in the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s), people of Mexican or Puerto Rican ancestry were a little less common and more confined to certain parts of the U.S. and certain neighborhoods elsewhere. You didn’t want to make nasty jokes about blacks because that came across as too obviously racist. They didn’t live in your neighborhood, but they lived in the next neighborhood. Italians had just become mainstream at that point, so using them in insults was a little dicey.
So if you were a white person living in a suburb of a northern U.S. city in the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s, Polish people were the simplest targets. They were at most a small group in the area you lived. That meant that you could deliberately hurt people by your mean jokes, but it was unlikely that there were enough around to immediately beat you up for those stupid insults.
Seriously… most Aggie jokes are just warmed-over derogatory jokes from a variety of races, ethnic groups or what-have-you. I’ve even heard dumb blonde jokes reworked a little as Aggie jokes.
In a lot of ways, the “meta” joke with them is that while Texas A&M may have been a backwater military school full of dumb-ass hicks back in the day, the modern institution is highly regarded in many academic fields, mostly agriculture, engineering or science related, and is not at all a backwater of dumb-ass hicks anymore.
The ‘stupid Poles’ trope got even more traction when stories began to circulate of Polish cavalry charging German tanks. The spin was, “see, look how stupid they are”.
If they had been, say, Norwegian, they’d have been hailed as Viking warriors charging to Valhalla.
ETA: I (now) see it as supreme heroism.
My personal feeling about why the Polish were portrayed as stupid is that Polish isn’t a Romance language* or Germanic, so, although people who spoke German, French, Italian, or Portuguese couldn’t speak English, anyone who knew a little German or a Romance language (even Latin) could get an idea of what they were saying, and make themselves somewhat understood. But Polish wasn’t in the same family, and the language barrier was that much higher. The Polish immigrants couldn’t pick up on what you were saying, so they must have been dumb.
My grandparents lived in the US most of their lives, but kept mostly to their own enclaves, and never really learned colloquial English, because they didn’t have to. To their dying days they had only a passing familiarity with the language of the country they lived in.
Add to this the fact that most of the Polish immigrants were peasants, with no higher education or high technical skills. My maternal grandmother got a job washing floors at the old Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, because it was a job an unskilled laborer could do. One day they gave her undiluted ammonia to use to clean the floor, and she plunged in her hands and scalded her skin. She couldn’t put her hands in water until they healed. The people at the hotel must have thought her extraordinarily stupid. But I doubt if she’;d ever seen or even heard of ammonia before. She ended up getting a job sewing clothes in a little nowhere town in New Jersey (she had no skill at sewing – she had to pick it up quickly), which is where she met my grandfather.
*But there is a surprising amount of latin in the Polish language – something I realized when studying both languages. It’s just not as obvious.
I thought it was amusing when my first wife and I went to visit her Polish heritage family in northern Minnesota, and heard them telling Finlander jokes, which were pretty much identical to Polish jokes.
In northeastern Wisconsin, when I was growing up in the 1970s, it was probably a 50/50 mix between Polish jokes and Belgian jokes, as the area had traditionally had a lot of Belgian immigrants.
This lot aren’t a block - in fact they all either hate or take pot shots at each other. Note the English and Irish. More likely, it comes from Germany - Poles have been the butt of various German tribes for centuries.
Someone from the Netherlands told me they make fun of Belgians using the same kind of jokes directed at other nationalities. He had developed a lot of language expertise in ESL classes he had to take despite his fluency in English. Besides learning curse words in many languages (something he found useful while playing soccer) he also found that every country makes fun of some other one, usually a neighboring country. And even within countries this exists, like Aggie jokes, and in Brazil where those from the state of Minas Gerais are ridiculed as stupid hicks in Rio.
My Brazilian teacher told us that they’re referred to as “flatheads”. When I was in Guatemala, I was surprised by the animosity towards the residents of the surrounding countries, usually categorized as stupid, lazy, etc.
…and in Michigan there are Yooper jokes (U.P. - Upper Peninsula), and in Nawlins’ there are Boudreaux & Thibodeaux jokes (Cajun)…
Any group is going to find some group to pick on as dumber, be it race, nationality, income level, urban/rural, etc.
I imagine when the aliens finally land they’ll have a whole bunch of “dumb earthling” jokes. (Anyone is welcome to steal this idea and make a quick buck with a book. You have my permission.)
Having grown up with Polish jokes (more correctly, “Polack jokes”), I found it interesting that the election of Pope John Paul II (aka the Polish Pope) pretty much ended the jokes, which were pretty much on their way out anyway.
This is just my impression, based on reading John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, but it sounded like, in the minds of established Americans, “Polack”
was a catchall category for any Central European immigrant - Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and of course Poles.
Really? I can think of two, right off the top of my head:
Nick and Spiros are arguing: “You’re a moron with a tiny dick!” “Yeah? Well, you can shove it up your ass!” “Oh, so now you want to kiss and make up!”
There’s also the joke about how loyal a Greek soldier is; he’ll never leave his buddy’s behind.
Back in the 1970’s, comedian Larry Wilde made a career out of books with ethnic jokes. I thought the first one was funny (I was 10, so it was probably the polish joke one), the 2nd one was 50% recycled from the first one, the third book about 80% recycled material, and I assume the pattern continued as they approached 100%.
They did, but it was early in the 19th Century, so nobody remembers. Then the Potato Famine enabled the Scandinavians to dish it out to the newcomers from Ireland.