There was even a Polish joke going around here for quite sometime after he became pope (I think I didn’t hear it until the early 90s) – Basically, the set up is some soul gets to heaven, meets St. Peter at the gate, and says “What the hell are you guys doing around here? Are you not paying attention! They just elected a Polish pope down there!” And the joke goes on, with the message being frantically relayed from one saint to another, scrambling to figure out how this mix-up could have happened, when finally the message gets to God who says “Ja wiem” (“I know” in Polish.) Best told shaggy-dog style.
As for the Polish jokes, I grew up with them, my dad telling me the most of them (he and my mom were both born in Poland.) As I like to say, “I wonder who that one dumb Pole was who ruined it for the rest of us!” But, seriously, as it’s always been explained to me, many of them came here to work in the stockyards and did manual labor, didn’t speak English at all or not very well, and thus were just kind of seen as “strong, but stupid.”
No; Irish people were bad-tempered drunks and I think blacks were lazy; not dumb. Dumb was pretty much just the Polish. 
And it was more just simple prejudice same as we have today. If you don’t remember it check this old Bill Cosby school film. It doesn’t make it nice but for most people there wasn’t really any evil intent.
Not quite. I was told a “good” one that actually involved the Pope John Paul II. I resist posting it though.
That’s the nice thing about structural, implicit racism though, right? You can help perpetuate systematic oppression and bigotry without having to go to the trouble of generating explicit evil intent on your own behalf
As a Belgian-American, I approve that joke.
It actually makes it easier to be a bigot, than not. Just go with the flow, make fun of Poles and if you don’t, you’re a stick in the mud.
I’m guessing you’re not of Greek extraction? And probably under 50? Growing up, I heard a lot of Greek jokes, which implied homosexuality, presumably based on the sexual culture of ancient Greece. Now that you mention it, I’ve never thought about why those died out.
More polite Greek jokes focused on how many of us owned restaurants (“You’re not Greek if you’ve never owned a restaurant”) which was a valid stereotype of the day not unlike Apu on the Simpsons.
But his papacy fathered (heh heh) the greatest one ever:
Q: What do you call a Polish guy with a $600 hat?
A: Your Holiness.
1/4 Greek, 33 years old. Yes, I’ve heard general wisecracks to the effect of that Greek men like to do each other in the ass. Never heard an actual “setup - punchline” format joke, the way all the Polish jokes are.
Google “Greek jokes” and you’ll find a few.
My memory’s not what it used to be, but I recall:
Q: What’s a Greek 10?
A: The back of a 2.
Q. What’s the most dangerous position in sports?
A. Center on a Greek football team.
Remember that “Polack” was a pretty flexible term. It got thrown at Poles, Russians, Ukranians, Czechs, etc. Pretty much anyone with as last name that had a lot of letters in it, and who spoke English with an accent, was a Polack.
I have a Polish friend, with a stereotypically Polish name, who married a Scandinavian. Her family shot right past “Polack” and decided he was Jewish.
You did click the link, right? Does it qualify as “structural, implicit racism” if everyone is included regardless or race, creed or national origin or anything else for that matter at pretty much the same point in history? Again, I am not saying its nice but ----- have you read any of the things posted here about either political party lately? 
I’m sorry but this all reminds me about the Polish joke about Polish jokes ------ this Church Council President had a bad habit of making Polish jokes at council meetings and other church functions. Finally the Pastor called him to task for it; “Johnathon – we want to be a church open to everyone and not just the English and Irish of our community. With the coal mines opening up we have a lot of newcomers who are Eastern European and we don’t want them to feel unwelcome. So next time you just HAVE to name a group in a joke make it something like the Hittites. OK?” Well, Johnathan agrees and everything is fine.
Until the next meeting when Johnathon starts his comments with “There were these two Hittites, Stash and Joe”.
And since I’m going to burn in Hell for a lot of things anyway:
Of course you do know that there is a group in Eastern Europe far dumber than the Polish, don’t you? Why do you think they’re called SLO-vaks?
Racism? If its a sign of anything its too many nights at various comedy clubs and Johnny Carson reruns.
Actual ethnic bigotry isn’t and wasn’t as cute as Bill Cosby’s portrayal. And that kind of “egalitarian” disparagement works to the advantage of a privileged class.
Well, one party has embraced white supremacy, is that what you mean? I’m not sure why that would be funny.
I’m half-Czech and grew up in mostly Eastern Euro ethnic Cleveland in the 60s. I never got called a Polack. That would be a sock in the nose offense, thanks to Ghoulardi.
“Bohunk.” Though I never heard any “dumb Bohunk” jokes. Probably because my last name is Irish.
You know what they say about Belgians: horum omnium fortissimi sunt Belgae, propterea quod a cultu atque humanitate provinciae longissime absunt, minimeque ad eos mercatores saepe commeant atque ea quae ad effeminandos animos pertinent important.
I grew up in an Irish-Italian neighborhood in the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s. Both groups told ethnic jokes about the other, but they mostly involved stuff like alcohol for one and grease and garlic for the other. They rarely were about the other group being dumb. Blacks were sometimes the butt of dumb jokes, but there weren’t any in the neighborhood.
Instead we told Little Moron jokes. (In my neighborhood, we just called them moron jokes.) While certainly not politically correct by today’s standards, they were at least dumb jokes about folks who were by definition less than intelligent.
We had very few Poles in our neighborhood, and I never heard any Polack jokes until the late 1960s, when they became very popular especially due to being featured on TV shows like Laugh-In.
They also put mayonnaise on their French fries (which they claim to have invented).
I do think unfamiliarity with English contributes to any group’s reputation as “stupid”.
Don’t think it was those, but I did have a couple of the books with Polish and Italian jokes (printed upside down, so that when you finished with the Polish jokes, you turned the book over and read the Italian ones), including the big omnibus one that had a dozen or so ethnicities: Native Americans, Italians, Poles (natch), Irish, even Scots. As I recall, each group was associated with one particular stereotype, around which the jokes were built: Poles were stupid, Irish were stupid and drunks, Scots were stupid and cheap (I suspect the Scottish jokes were recycled Jewish jokes, that even then were beyond the pale. No Jewish jokes in the book. The other noticeable omission was African-Americans).
That describes me, as well, although my surname is Scottish; my Cleveland-born grandfather’s birth name was “Poskocil”. Never heard any “Bohunk” jokes, but I certainly did hear the word.
I do admit to remembering and enjoying the Scottish jokes I read. "Jock MacHoots gives his son Sandy 50p every morning to get the bus to school. One day, Sandy saves his siller and runs home behind the bus. Excited, he bursts in to tell his father, ‘Da! I rin behind the boos and savit 50p!’ Jock gives him a clout on the head and says, ‘Ye wee numpty! Why did ye no run behind a cab and save three pun?!’ "
I’ve often wondered how and why people like you have that attitude, and where it comes from: i.e., “Anybody who is not offended at the same things that I’m offended at is a bigot.”