They’re not really ‘Polish jokes’… you can insert any group that it’s fashionable to make fun of at a given time. Pick an ethnicity, a race, whatever is socially acceptable joke fodder where you live.
I had a book when I was little that had a lot of these jokes in it, but they were about ‘the little moron’.
The great wave of Polish immigration in the early 20th Century coincided with the rise of a hateful eugenic reform movement in the U.S., and the first widespread use of I.Q. tests.
It was a time when there was a great deal of hand-wringing over “keeping America American” (to use Calvin Collidge’s phrase) as the proportion of white Americans from places other than northwestern Europe–e.g., Scandinavia, Germany, and the British Isles increased.
In those days there was a good deal of flagrant misuse of I.Q. tests as examinations based on American mores were imposed on people who were unfamiliar with American culture or even much English. This, combined with the fact that many Poles lived in immigrant enclaves in a few large American cities, where they less likely to convert to speaking relatively accent-free English (there are still a fair number of Polish Americans in places such as New York who speak Polish as their primary language), helped establish an impression of Poles as dull and ponderous.
Here is a real Polish joke–that is, one told in Poland. It dates back to the days of the Soviet Union:
A man stumbles into a police station disshevelled and bleeding.
The desk sergeant asks what happened.
“I was just walking down the street minding my own business.” the man replies, “when two tough Swiss soldiers pulled me into an alley, beat the crap out of me, and stole my expensive Russian watch.”
“No, wait”, the policeman replies, “you mean you were walking down the street when two Russian soldiers beat you up and stole your expensive Swiss watch.”
The man looks around at all of the people who have gathered and says: “Hey, you all saw who said it!”
Maybe you had to be there.
I have an uncle by marriage who is of Polish descent, and is an engineer who is extremely accomplished in his field. His favorite Polish joke goes like this:
“What’s black and blue and funny?”
“A guy who tells Polish jokes in the wrong part of Chicago.”
Some thoughts:
Before blacks broke the color barrier in U.S. sports, there were a notable number of Polish football players. Bronco Nagurski is probably the prototype. Polish names tend to stick out on a roster of Smiths and Joneses. So if you wanted to portray a big, not-too-bright football player, you called him Kowalski or somesuch.
In James Thurber’s “The Male Animal” there is a scene at a WASPish college where the school’s football team is introduced, and all the names sound Polish or something akin.
Also, Americans, not being very up on their history, probably had little idea of the past accomplishments of Poland. First-hand experience for a lot of Americans probably came in WWII, when they saw a battered country as looking agrarian and backward.
Americans always loved ethnic humor. Vaudeville was rife with stock German, Swedish, Italian and Irish types. But Polish jokes came along at a time when ethnic humor was no longer considered polite. This didn’t apply solely to jokes about blacks and Jews, but also about Indians (often portrayed as drunk) and Chinese immigrants (typically quoting Confucius, etc.) But you could tell a Polish joke because it wasn’t seen as racism.
“In America, you tell jokes about Poles. In Russia, Poles tell jokes about you!”
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
I think that a stereotype of “dumb” has been associated with every immigrant group, as others have pointed out, but with every other group some other characteristic took precedence and became the “canonical” stereotype. For example, Italian=Mafiosi, German=authoritarian, Irish=heavy drinker, French=snooty, Bohemian=cheap, and so on. With Poles, there just wasn’t much else to go on. Nothing ever replaced the basic “dumb immigrant” stereotype. I guess, how many jokes can you make about excessive cleanliness?
As to Rhum Runner’s joke, and I know its only a joke, but it just goes to show how odd it is to pick on certain nationalities, but the Polish submarine service was very successful in WWII. There were two polish submarines (Sokol and Dzik) operating out of Malta, which were so successful they were known as the ‘Terrible Twins’.
Somehow I doubt they would have opened the door.
HP’s RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) is always good for a few laughs.
I think Poland has gotten the wrong end of the deal by being physically located between Germany & Russia - the object of jokes by both Russians & Germans.
Hey - I live in New Jersey, between New York and Philadelphia - I know what its like!
Any ethnic joke where you can substitute one group for another -where ‘two Poles were walking down the street’ can be replaced with ‘two Italians…’ etc - is wrong. Jokes like that are an exercise in stereotyping and discrimination. They might be funny, but they are hurting someone out there.
Off my soapbox I go!
Jan Lukasiewicz was by no means stupid. (And maybe not Polish either, but that’s another discussion.)
All HP did was to change the order…
The stereotype is definitely not supported by a recent Fark link: IQs in various countries.
The RPN laughs are when anyone else tries to borrow your calculator 
PJ O’Rourke mentions a joke told by Poles in one of his books.
A veteran goes to stand in line for meat. He stays there for 2 hours, then by the time he finally gets to the front of the line, they run out.
The veteran starts complaining. “I’ve served my country and this is the thanks I get! What kind of government is this that’s supposed to provide for me and my family but doesn’t?” The meat vendor takes him aside and tells him “Comrade, be thankful for what you’ve got now. See that guard over there? Last year, if you had complained, he would have shot you.”
So the veteran returns home. His wife sees him empty-handed and says “What happened? Did they run out of meat?”
“Even worse,” he replies. “They ran out of bullets.”
I guess you’ve never been to rural Wisconsin…
My wife’s Polish, from just outside of Wausau. Her grandparents came over during WWI.
There’s one Polish joke I get to tell…
Back in the Middle Ages, a Polish gentleman was vacationing in Ireland. While walking along the banks of a stream, he hears a little voice crying, “Help me! Help me, sir!”
He looks around and finds a leprechaun trapped under a fallen tree branch. The leprechaun says, “Rescue me, and I’ll grant ye three wishes!”
Being a kind and generous sort, the gentleman rescues the leprechaun, who leaps to his feat and asks the gentleman what his three wishes will be. “Money, fame, and women?” the leprechaun asks.
The gentleman thinks for a moment and says, “I would like the Mongol horde to come boiling across the steppe in the spring, invade Poland, and leave in the fall.”
“You are a very odd fellow,” says the leprechaun, “but I will grant your wish. What would you like for your other two wishes?”
“I’d like to see how this first one turns out,” says the gentleman. “Can you come to my house in the fall?”
“Sure,” says the leprechaun.
That spring, the Mongol Horde came boiling across the steppe, invaded Poland, and left in the fall. As the last horse vanished over the horizon, there was a knock at the gentleman’s door. He opened it to find the leprechaun on his doorstep.
The leprechaun asked what the gentleman wanted for his next wish, and the gentleman thought for a moment and said, “I would like the Mongol horde to invade Poland again, next year.”
“You are still very odd,” says the leprechaun. “I suppose you’d like to wait until next fall to make your last wish?”
“Yes, please,” said the gentleman.
That spring, the Mongol Horde invaded Poland again, and left in the fall. As the last horse vanished over the horizon, there was a knock at the gentleman’s door. He opened it to find the leprechaun on his doorstep.
The leprechaun asked what the gentleman wanted for his third wish, and the gentleman thought for a moment and began to speak, but the leprechaun interrupted him.
“Hold it right there, mister! If you want me to make the Mongol Horde invade Poland three times, you’re going to have to explain why!”
“Simple,” said the gentleman. “They have to cross Russia six times.”
Western Canada didn’t get much in the way of Polish immigration, but we have a lot of Ukrainians. Any and all “Polish” jokes are, therefore, “Ukrainian” jokes around here.
Stupid Poles? Polish jokes?
Are you sure you aren’t confusing Poles with Polacks?
Yeah, that’s what I wrote in the first place. But I just joined this board, and to tell the truth, I skimmed over the Rules of Conduct and what have you. I wasn’t sure if I’d get blasted for using the word “polak”. Instead, I wrote “Pole”, which, I’ll have you know, is a) the correct term and b) a little funnier than “Polak”, I think.
Yeah. I’m a wild one.
I don’t know how Poles got such a reputation for stupidity, but it must go back along way, at least in the English-speaking world. Why else did Shakespeare name his stupidest character “Polonius”?
I don’t know how Poles got such a reputation for stupidity, but it must go back a long way, at least in the English-speaking world. Why else did Shakespeare name his stupidest character “Polonius”?
Since when was english a second language in Ireland?
Hard to say. Maybe 1690
slipster, above, tells the story that I was taught.
As IQ tests were developed in the 1930’s, various immigrants were tested. The test was administered in English, and Polish immigrants fared poorly due to the linguistic bias of the tests. This lead to a popular misconception that Poles had low intelligence.