I have to agree with the guy. A joke is supposed to be funny. You don’t need to have any agenda to tell a funny joke. So maybe the joke is insulting to someone, OK maybe you’re a jerk for telling it, but a racist?
If I tell a Polish joke is that racist too? What if I’m Polish?
What about a newfie joke? (A newfie is someone who lives in Newfoundland) That’s not really an ethnicity.
I was pretty suprised by the reaction. I thought only elementary school teachers spread this kind of thinking.
The audience. It’s one thing to tell racist, crude, or whatever kind of jokes to your friends, knowing that no onne else is going to hear them. It’s another thing to broadcast tacky comments on a public forum, like the Internet, or even in a public area where others might overhear and be offended.
The intensions of the joke teller affect my perception of him/her. Telling a derogitory joke to illustrate why a group of people are substandard is different from sharing humor about human nature.
my opinion is you can make fun of your ethinic group and that’s it. I’m half Polish and half Russian. so i can tell polish and russian jokes, but not british jokes? ya see?
I read a good “Whitey” joke years ago, but I don’t want to descend to the level of those whose motive the previous posters have questioned. So I will only post it here if subsequent posters agree to it.
A woman came to work a couple of days ago wearing a tee-shirt with a racist “joke”. She was told to either cover it up, wear it inside out, or go home and change.
Know what’s funny? She couldn’t understand why her shirt was offensive because she didn’t get the joke. It was just way over her head.
Well, I’d like to hear a good whitey joke. In fact, I like to hear any good joke. The problem with most racial/ethinic/gender jokes is that they’re not funny. IMHO most of the genre is just a setup to make a pejorative statement about the group in question. Only on rare occasions do I hear ones that are witty or clever, and I usually laugh at them. I don’t believe this makes me racist; since everybody is full of shit sometimes, we’re all fair game sometimes. The hard part is knowing where to draw the line.
Larry
Did you here about the one about the pagan, the pollock, and the Nazi?
Since I’m part-polish, german and don’t really belive in christianity anymore, I can tell this joke and not be called a racist, and not get in trouble because I’m making fun of my background? To me, its all about where you tell a joke and who you tell it to. There’s a place for most racist jokes, and this website sure as hell isn’t one of them.
(and if anyone actually heard of such a joke, email and tell me the catch phrase!)
“I’m not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.”-- Calvin and Hobbes
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…c.c…c.c…
I try to make an effort to know jokes about as many nationalities as possible. Some people memorize useless things like the capitals of every country in the world. What’s the point of that? You can’t insult anyone by telling them the capital of their country. If I can’t insult someone in their own language I at least try to tailor the insult to their nationality.
Like when my Egyptian friend starts asking how many wonders of the world Poland has I say something like “Why does driving school let out at noon in Egypt? Because they need the camels for sex ed in the afternoon”.
I once saw a comedian put a clear plastic bag over his head and say, “Look! I’m the Polish unknown comic!”. Everyone laughed. The joke itself did not offend me, what pisses me off is if the same comedian had made a joke about blacks or Hispanics and crime, another stereotype, he would have gotten bottles thrown at his head and his career would have been over. On another note, I was once on a racist joke site and the jokes were divided up in sections. For every section, there was a derogatory term for the race EXCEPT black jokes, which were referred to as “African American jokes”. What does that say about our society? A person has no problem calling every race by it’s most offensive term except for “African Americans”? I don’t get it.
So much of humor is pain or very sharp points turned around to make a point, it’s hard to draw the lines sometimes. Two memories:
going to a Richard Pryor performance when he was at the top of his game. The audience was mixed: black and white, male and female. And let’s face it, no one is as non-PC, raunchy and gasping, can’t breathe, tears down the face, honking funny like he was. He took no prisoners, poking fun at race, sex and the whole human enchilada.
At first the audience was a bit inhibited, from all those good ideals, but it didn’t take long to have the whole place falling of their chairs laughing.
I married into a purely Scandanavian family. Blonde, tall, etc. etc. So doncha know, turns out the matriarch had disgraced the family:a pure Norwegian, she had upped and married a Swede. Being a mongrel myself, my reaction was “do whuuut??”.
The hometown, mostly Norwegian and lutefisk intensive (sorry, couldn’t resist)lived on Swedish jokes. Hey, the local bar was called, “The Swede’s Office”. I kid you not.
The Swedes in town handed it back in spades.
So, boring memories aside, I get very itchy and twitchy when basic sensitivity lapses into gray, boring paranoia. If laughter can hurt, it can also instruct. So yeah, so much of it depends on the teller of the joke and who it’s being told to. But I really hate the thought police who try to legislate humor, too.
OK, here it is:
A black guy was minding his own business in a bar, sipping a beer. A drunken white guy staggered over to him and gushed, "Y’know what? You’re black! your face, your arms, your face, your neck–I’ll bet you’re black all over!"
The black guy asked, “Would you like to see a white spot on my body?”
The drunk slurred, “I sshure would!”
The black guy said with a straight face, “Stick a radish in my but and bite it.”