Bolding mine
The word on the street when Pope John Paul II came to visit in, what was it, 1980 or 1979 or thereabouts, was that Chicago had more people of Polish heritage than any city in the world other than Warsaw. I don’t know if it’s true, but it was widely believed to be.
Illinois is the only state to celebrate Casmir Pulaski day, I believe. I’ve always heard that the reason for that was the large Polish population of Chicago.
What about Olie and Sven or Olie and Lena jokes?
Kosciusko County and Warsaw were not named that because there were lots of Poles living there. They were named for Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Polish-American hero. He was not actually from Warsaw, though, and the town was probably named that under the influence of the book Thaddeus of Warsaw. This page has more on how the various Warsaw’s in the US got named.
Other places named after Polish cities can be found here (full disclosure: I compiled the list on that page with the help of SDMBers.)
I’m pretty young, but I’d still hear them. I remember when I learned that Polack was a weird way to say Polish person.
I’m actually surprised everyone calls the Polish jokes, and that the Wikipedia article doesn’t even use the other word. Is it a full on pejorative, so people avoid saying it? I honestly don’t know.
One day when I was ten or twelve, my dad came home and told us that he had come across a great Polish joke and asked if we wanted to hear it. My sister and I, in our budding enlightenment, admonished him for being inappropriate. He insisted that it was a great Polish joke, and that we should hear it.
He proceeds to pull out a battered cassette tape he found on the ground somewhere, and puts it in our tape recorder. The recording was of a heavily accented man speaking, as in giving a lecture to a large group, in a foreign language, presumably Polish. The man spoke several sentences that were unintelligible to us, and then his audience erupted in raucous laughter.
Best Polish joke I’ve ever heard.
A Polish joke back from the days of Solidarność in the late '80s, before the USSR collapsed -
A family in Chicago sends one thousand American dollars to family in Poland to help get them through the strikes. At that moment they do not need the money.
Wife: Let’s put in the local bank until we need it.
Husband: But what if, in these uncertain times, our local bank collapses?
W: They are guaranteed by the bank of Gdansk.
H: What the bank of Gdansk falls?
W: They are guaranteed by the bank of Warsaw.
H: And if it fails?
W: Guaranteed by the bank of Poland.
H: And what if the Bank of Poland collapses?
W: They are backed by the strength of the USSR!
H: And what if the USSR collapse?
W: Wouldn’t that be worth a thousand US dollars!?!
The last Polish joke I ever heard.
And Sven and Olie jokes; at least among the Lutherans.
So you’re Lutheran as well? 
The three of them went out ice fishing together in Sven’s pickup truck. Being a gentleman, Olie offered to sit in the open bed so Lena could sit in the passenger side and fish out the window while Sven did the same from his drivers seat. The ice started to crack and Sven and Lena got out right away but poor Olie was still in the back when the truck plunged through the ice. Finally a minute later he bobbed to the surface and they fished him out. “Thank God you’re here to help me to firm ice — I’m still exhausted from trying to get the tailgate open.”
(oldlutheran.com used to have pages of those)
yes, The Big Book of Jewish Humor has a section on “The Wise Men of Chelm.” Good stuff.
It’s not a “weird” way of saying “Polish,” it’s offensive. Not as much as the most offensive term for blacks but it is now considered a pejorative. Older generations may not have, in the same vane that my old neighbor went to the grave calling all Japanese by the shortened, now very offensive term.
I grew up not knowing that term was related to Polish people. And has a friend with a -ski last name. Smack!
Growing up in Chicago and Green Bay, I’d never heard them. But, in college, I dated a girl from suburban St. Paul; when I’d go up there with her to visit her family, her father would regale me with Sven and Olie jokes.
Brando as Stanley Kowalski in 1951’s “A Streetcar Named Desire”:
"I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles. They are not Polacks. But what I am is one hundred percent American. I’m born and raised in the greatest country on this earth and I’m proud of it. And don’t you ever call me a Polack. "
…way before the 70s.
“Polack” is generally considered pejorative. Being Polish-American, though, (my parents both born in Poland, I was born here), I definitely heard it a lot growing up in what I would consider a non-pejorative manner, and I still hear it that way occasionally, especially among some of the older Chicagoans. Maybe I’m just not as sensitive to the word, given that the word for a Polish person is polak in Polish, but it never had the bite to me that words like “spic” or “dago” had to my ears.
It does sound jarring hearing it from a younger person, though. I was taking engagement photos a few years back of an Indian couple, and I somehow got to talking about our respective ethnic heritages, and he kept referring to Polish people as “polacks.” I found it amusing, more than anything, since he obviously was not using it in an offensive manner, and I just didn’t feel like correcting him.
Now “dumb Polack” is a different story.
But this is just me and my feelings and experiences with the word. Plus there is a certain amount of in-group use of the word (like I’ll talk about “Polacks” when I’m with my old-neighborhood friends, many of whom are of Polish extraction, too.) that probably jades me to it.
When I played in youth orchestras, people told jokes about violists. Some were musical,* but a lot of them were repurposed Polish/dumb blonde jokes.
Just did the math and realized I’m a blond violist with 1/4 Finnish ancestry and a half-sister who’s half-Polish.
I remember “Polack” jokes being quite popular up to a few years before Karol Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II. They had been fading for a few years, but the election of a Polish Pope pretty much killed them off for good.
I remember a spate of Polish Pope jokes after the accession of J2P2 (“Why does the Pope want a bar to open across from the Vatican? So he has a place to cash his paycheck.” “Why is the Pope collecting bowling balls? He is making a rosary for the Statue of Liberty.”) That was in Milwaukee, where Polish jokes are what Germans tell when they aren’t telling Iowa jokes. Polish immigrants came to Milwaukee after Germans, therefore they were the butt of jokes.
On my first date with the eventual Lovely and Talented Mrs. Shodan, I said “I know a good Polish joke.” She said, “I’m half Polish”. I said, “that’s OK, I will go slow”, but she still married me.
Regards,
Shodan
One of the jokes from my neighborhood after the Pope was elected:
A man dies and ends up at the pearly gates of heaven in front of St. Peter. He says, “Hey, St. Peter. Did you hear? They just elected a Polack pope down there!” St. Peter says, “Holy shit! A Polack pope? That ain’t right. We gotta let the Big Guy know about this.” Not wanting to leave his post at the gates, he summons over Gabriel. “Hey, Gabriel, listen man; there’s some weird shit going down. You gotta let God know they just elected a Polack pope!” Gabriel says “Get the fuck outta here!” “No, really!” “Shit, let me run over there right now and tell him. This must be some oversight–there’s a lot going on right now and these things slip through the cracks.” Gabriel runs over to God’s throne and says, “My Lord, my apologies for disturbing you, I know you are busy, but I have the most frightening news for you. St. Peter just informed me that they elected a Polack pope down on Earth.” To which God replies, ja wiem. (Polish for “I know.”)
Ba-dum-dum.
Best told as a shaggy dog type of story, but I don’t quite have the energy to improvise on it.
From memory, pretty sure Shakespeare referred to Polacks in Hamlet, referring to a winter battle.
The pope joke I remembered was that for a miracle he cured a ham.
I was never offended by Polack jokes when young. Of course, that was a different time.
The guys I golf with are mostly of Polish and Italian ethnicity. It is not at all unusual for one of us to refer to another as a Polack. And I have often referred to myself as a cheap ass Polack. And it is hard to imagine a situation in which a mean-spirited individual could get much of a rise out of me by calling me a dumb Polack.
Brother Cadafel:
Maybe, but I remember one joke that came out of that event - not a “Polack” joke, but a great pun: “How do they elect the Pope?” “They take a poll (Pole).”
Indeed. Back in the day when we used to refer to sleeveless tee-shirts as “dago tees.” Then again, I’m not sure the slang “wifebeater” is much better…