That’s exactly along the lines of what I was thinking when reading the OP. 
A couple years ago, I was at this work event at which people from different departments were all mixed together. Some of us knew each other, but there were also people who only knew each other as nodding acquaintances on the elevator. To break the ice, one guy told a Polish joke; I don’t mean a post-modern, ironic take on ethnic jokes, I mean a straight up Polish joke your uncle would tell at thanksgiving in 1972. People weren’t so much offended as baffled, it was like he was doing a Spiro Agnew impression. People just kind of looked at each other.
Some of them, sure, but a lot of them don’t work as blond or redneck jokes, like “How do you sink a Polish battleship?” “Put it in water.” “How did the Germans conquer Poland so quickly?” “They marched in backwards and the Polish thought they were all leaving.” “What do you do when a Polish person throws a hand grenade at you?” “Pull the pin and throw it back.” Etc. Maybe the last one could work as a “blonde” joke, but it doesn’t seem quite the right stereotype.
<Raising Arizona>
Why’s it take three Polacks to screw in a light bulb?
I dunno, Glenn, why?
'Cause they’re so darn stupid! Har, har!..No, wait, I told it wrong…
</Raising Arizona>
I’ve often wondered exactly what it was to prompt the various ethnic jokes to converge on being specifically “Polish jokes” in the 1960s. I first recall hearing the Polish specifically targeted on Laugh-In.
When I was going to a parochial high school in the Bronx in the 1960s, we had lots of ethnic jokes which were told mostly interchangeably about the Irish, Italians, and Puerto Ricans, the main ethnic groups at the school, depending on which group you belonged to. (Poles were rare in my neighborhood.) In the 1960s, many of these same jokes began to appear on TV as Polish jokes.
There were earlier targets.
In the late 19th-early 20th century, there was a widespread stereotype about the “dumb Swede”. Swedish people were targeted in the same way Poles were targeted in the 1960s and 70s. Robert Service even wrote a poem in which the point was a “Dumb Swede” turning the tables on his WASP-y persecutors - it only “works” if you know that Swedes had a widespread stereotype of stupidity.
Then, it completely died out.
My guess is that it has to do with immigration patterns. Recent immigrants that talk funny = targets.
Didn’t it have to do with Hitler? I remember hearing in a few places that Hitler popularized the Polish joke as a way of demeaning the people he was conquering. Something like that.
It occurred to me a few years back that I hadn’t heard a Polish joke in years. Then it occurred to me I’d never heard a Polish joke outside of All in the Family. I couldn’t help wondering if that show made them popular.
Nm
I think there’s a lot of truth in this.
I grew up in Chicago, like a couple of others in the thread. My neighborhood had very few Poles (or Bohemians), but it did have quite a lot of African Americans.
I heard a very occasional “black joke” growing up. But even for a somewhat airheaded (white) 10-12 year old like me, I had a very clear sense that these jokes were NOT okay, and that my parents would have my hide if I were to tell them in any remotely public venue, including the dinner table.
I was born in the early sixties, so I was growing up at a time when issues of race were very present, and a lot of white Americans(not all by any means) were developing a new consciousness about race and what it meant. My parents were exactly the kinds of people who might have decided it was simply not acceptable to tell racist jokes any more, and passed that on to their kids.
But there was no civil rights movement for Poles, no history of enslavement, no sense that they had been discriminated against in the same way as blacks–so we could (and did) still tell jokes aimed at them. And so I heard a lot of Polish jokes (“Did you hear about the Polack who…”), told by blacks and whites alike, and it was okay to repeat those jokes even when adults could hear–hey, a lot of them were told by adults. I don;t know, as I wasn;t there, but I kind of suspect that there were analogues of those jokes told 10-15-20 years earlier in that same neighborhood, only aimed at blacks instead. So the Polish jokes were “a then-safe alternative,” indeed.
Right, there have always been jokes aimed at other ethnic groups too, including other European groups, and people from poor, uncool parts of the US/Canada. Italians have been mentioned, though I’m not sure I ever heard an Italian joke except in jokes about contests between the “Polacks” and the Italians (both contrived to lose). My cousins in Wisconsin knew many of the same Polish jokes I did, but theirs were about “Norskies.” A little later, my cousins in Ontario told similar jokes about “Newfies.” Hillbillies have been mentioned too.
The trouble with Polish jokes being related to immigration is that in the sixties and seventies, when POlish jokes took off, immigration from Poland was very low.
Hell, I heard the majority of Polish jokes from my dad!
Yup, “Newfies” were a target in Ontario. A poor province, spoke with a funny accent, some moved to other provinces to find work … such jokes have more or less died out though.
There was a huge uptick in immigration from Poland following WW2, and the imposition of Communism: my in-laws came during that time … the 1950s saw the greatest absolute number of Polish-born Americans in history. See “Poland” and “1950” on this table:
The jokes of the '60s and '70s were probably influenced by those growing up with this influx in mind.
Flatheads! Or at least, that’s what my Brazilian language teacher told us.
Even with that requirement, it’s still very incomplete.
They were just a small ethnic group with no influence. In the UK, we used to tell the same jokes about the Irish. I was told that Irish people used Cork as the butt. I suppose that today it would be acceptable to adapt them for North Koreans, but I think that the appetite for racist/sexist/homophobic jokes is thankfully a thing of the past in civilised company.
Hollywood has the same problem when they need an enemy nation. Russia/USSR used to be the bogeyman; now NK or some fictional S American/African state has to serve.
Anybody want to clue me in on how the two augusts are pronounced differently?
The capitalized one has stress on the first syllable; the lower case, on the second. Personally, I also give a full vowel sound (instead of a schwa) to the second syllable for lower case (as is usually the case for stressed syllables in English), but for some reason, that’s not supported by M-W.
Or some sub-division of the same nationality (as with your Brazilian example)… the people of Great Britain make jokes about the stupidity of the inhabitants of the neighbouring island of Ireland. In Ireland, it’s the people of the county of Kerry who are reputedly stupid: the rest of the Irish, tell “Kerryman” jokes. A Spanish colleague once told me that the Spaniards tell “stupid” jokes about the people of the town of Lepe, in Spain’s far south-west (if Nava sees this, she’ll maybe weigh in to confirm or correct !).
I gather that in Poland itself, the legendary “stupid” place is the town of Chełm, near the Ukrainian border. It would seem that for a very long time, this was a Jewish thing: Eastern Europe’s Jews relished numerous jokes and stories about Chełm, supposedly inhabited almost entirely by utterly stupid Jews – with a few equally stupid Christians to perform Sabbath tasks for their Jewish neighbours. Owing to tragic events over the past three-quarters of a century, there are to all intents and purposes now no Jews in Chełm; but one understands that the Polish gentiles have taken the place over, for humorous purposes, as the one with a homogeneously stupid population
Then please expand. I love this sort of language trivia. August/august is a nice pair. Ares/ares is pushing it a bit for my tastes. What other good ones are there?