Why were polish jokes ever a thing (as they were in my adolescence in the late 60s/ early 70s)?
It is just an early meme. Polish jokes weren’t even about real Polish people. It was just a fictitious label meant to be humorous. The named group even varied sometimes. Where I grew up, the exact same jokes used “Aggies” (Texas A&M graduates) as their meme. Nobody really thought that they were dumb but you had to pick some defined group to make the joke work.
Different versions of that type of joke are a universal phenomenon:
Unsurprisingly, there’s a wiki for that.
Moved to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I remember my brother having a half Polish half Italian joke book with the two different sections printed in different directions so you had to turn it upside down. I don’t really remember what underlying stereotype what being exploited for the Italian side as I can’t seem to recall the jokes. There was one alluding to body odor (?) that involved Italians raising their arms and knocking their enemy unconscious. Now that I think about it it was also a jab at their performance in WWII.
I don’t recall where my brother got the book but it’s entirely possible by dad gave it to him. Not because my dad was a bigot or anything; he worked in the toy industry and we had all manner strange toys, books and other novelties growing up. I can’t imagine such a book being sold / read out in the open today.
As a person with 100% Polish heritage, I’ve always wanted to know who the hell was the dumb Polish guy who screwed it up for the rest of us! 
And capital “P,” please. It may be the only English word that changes pronunciation and meaning whether it’s capitalized or not (not counting when they start a sentence, when they’re both capitalized.)
I think the simple answer is that, at the time, the current wave of low-education working-class immigrants was from Eastern Europe.
The jokes could be very funny, or just a way of demeaning people. When funny they can easily be applied to any group of people or just a generic ‘moron’. Poles were supposed to be stupid and slovenly. The women, as in every group, were promiscuous. Italians were stupid, cowardly (WWII reference), and slovenly. It’s common in any nation to have some other nationality that is the butt of their jokes. In Brazil they make fun of the people from Minas Gerais the way we make fun of hillbillies here. The trouble is that some people don’t care about any underlying generic humor in the jokes, just the degradation of certain people.
My last name ends in “ski” and I was raised on the NW side of Chicago where peoples’/neighborhoods’ ethnicity was just taken for granted. I remember my dad saying that before they were Polish jokes, they were Bohemian jokes. One example I remember:
Q: Why didn’t Bohemians commit suicide when the stock market crashed?
A: You can’t kill yourself jumping out of a basement apartment window.
A real kneeslapper, ain’t it?
I’m SW side, and we had remnants of Bohemian jokes as well around here. The only one I can remember though is calling the gangway (the space between two buildings), where there usually is a strong breeze a “Bohemian air conditioner.” Hardy har. Seems to be riffing on a similar theme of either frugalness or being poor as yours.
Q: What do you call a person who thinks English has only one capitonym?
A: Polish! (I kid, I kid.)
It’s very close, though. The other two (note that I did say meaning and pronunciation) are “Ares/ares” and “August/august.”
That’s because that list is woefully incomplete. Another, for example, is Junker (Prussian aristocrat)/junker (beat up car). If we include places names, it opens up an even bigger Diet of Worms. That wouldn’t be Nice, so don’t do it.
I’ll note that “polish” in the subject line and OP of this thread is not capitalized, so it’s about someone engaged in the polish business that walks into a bar. Nothing to do with a certain eastern European ethnic group.
These were huge in the 1970s or so. I had… probably far too many. And I am honestly abashed that I ever thought that stripe of humor was funny. (There are four or five of the best jokes I know buried in there, though.) And except in most print forms, the word was not, uh, “Polish.”
Many of the jokes were recycled and quite old. I remember the Russian one being pretty funny, from a 1960s Sovietski kind of angle. …Two Russians met on the sidewalk. “Ivan!” said the first. “Where did you buy a roll of toilet paper?” “Ah,” said Ivan, “Is not new roll. Just bringing this old thing home from the cleaners.” Etc.
So a polish guy walks into a bar and exclaims to the bartender, “Damn, what a dull bartop!”
It was strange that Polish jokes were so prevalent and so acceptable in the '70s. I remember seeing t-shirts with Polish jokes on them and there was a Carol Burnett skit that was basically a long Polish joke about a Polish run airline.
Think of them as the then-safe alternative to racial jokes, from a population with little power to counter the stereotyping and diminishment.
I had that book (I was 14). The Italian section was mainly about their heavy accents and the loose morals of their women.
Didn’t all the Polish jokes kind of turn in to “blonde woman” jokes in the 90s? Then maybe rednecks.
Polish jokes were huge in Cleveland in the 70s. Our local TV heroes Big Chuck & Lil John had weekly sketches about a “Certain Ethnic…” man named Stosh. Random example.
It does say it’s only for “dictionary words.”