Just wondering how & why Polish jokes came into being? How far back did this nonsense go? WWII? - Jinx
I’m guessing turn of the century, when Polish workers were many and often below dtandard at jobs due to lingustic difficulties.
I grew up in the midwest in a locale with a lot of Swedes. Every Polish joke I’ve ever heard, I had heard before in one form or another, as a Swedish joke.
My WAG is that settlers with English roots were there first. Then along came a bunch of Swedish field hands whose way over was paid by the local farmers. After the passage had been worked off as hired hands, the Swedes who were sober and hard working people, began to save their money and buy farms. Pretty soon these “foreigners who couldn’t even speak English” began to exert some economic muscle which was deeply resented. The only thing that could be done legally was to make fun of them.
I think many other cultures have the sociological equivalent of Polish jokes. In Russian, there are Chukchi jokes (the Chukchis are a small indigenous ethnic group in Siberia). There are also Armenian jokes in Russian, but they are just plain surreal rather than being about the stupidity of a particular ethnic group.
This has been discussed so recently that I’ll close this thread and direct further comment to the most recent thread on the subject: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=167795
bibliophage
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