Polish jokes - what was the deal?

Again, this is what I was told.

My mom (who's 61) remembers when Catholic kids were not allowed to play with her (her parents were agnostic) and some kids' parents (Lutherans, mostly) discouraged their kids from playing with Catholic children.

Not that that makes the jokes okay, or anything.

"raising arizona," natch.

what's kind of cool is that our nanny now is polish, so our son can maybe get from her some sense of actual polishness, which i never had. i've never identified with my polish roots as anything except vaguely embarrassing.

But then a recent viewing of Sixteen Candles reminded me that that particular caricature/bigotry was doing just fine as of the mid-80s, in "comedy" form.

I just heard this word recently used by a friend as a derogatory term for what I would have called a redneck when I was a kid. What's the origin?

I have heard Polish jokes in the U.S. that were exactly the same as Irish jokes in the U.K. and Belgian jokes in France.

i also reckon that polish jokes caught on at least in part b/c unlike certain other white ethnics (like italians, the irish, or jews) polish-americans weren't quite as high-profile or as prominent as the aforementioned -- so it wasn't as risky to tell polish jokes as it would be, for instance, to tell irish jokes. not to mention that the stereotypes attached to asians or jews were the exact OPPOSITE of being thought dumb.

these kinds of jokes never bothered me. i've never lost a job, or been denied housing, b/c of my ethnicity.

Given California's attitude to 'celestials' and other Asians dating back to the Gold Rush, racist jokes seem like some of the least evil stuff this country did to them. I can't remember where I saw it, 'Life' maybe, but there was a magazine depiction comparing a Japanese and a Chinese man from '42 or 43' worthy of a phrenologist or the worst eugenicist and showing through physionomy the difference between a good Chinese man and a dastardly Japanese one.

i was actually going to mention this -- when i was an undergrad, i remember reading something about how tennessee williams deliberately made stanley kowalski a polish-american b/c in his view they were all a bunch of brutish low-class thugs. on the other hand, i never even knew about mr. williams's prejudices until i read about it -- and i dunno if polish-americans find stanley kowalski as offensive and stereotypical as, say, some italians find characters in "the sopranos" to be offensively stereotypical.

1.) "Chinese fire drill"
2.) "Me Chinese, me make joke / me put pee-pee in your Coke"

img src="http://www.bondmovies.com/henchmen/oddjob.jpg"

Sentiment Concerning the Chinese

Eisbär, I love you! I never met a non-Ruthenian who even knew what a Ruthenian was. Are you a fellow Bohunk Rusnak like me, Andy Warhol, and Sandra Dee?

no, i am not ruthenian. i know about ruthenians b/c my father's hometown has a ruthenian orthodox church (actually, they call themselves "carpatho-rusyn") next to where some of my relatives lived when i was a youth.

still love me though? :-)

i currently work in NYC. my dad was raised in a factory town in central NJ called manville (an hour away from passaic), which is where the carpatho-rusyn orthodox church is located. my grandfather was born around pittsburgh.

http://www.collectorsbookmarket.com/Auction/APUserImages/ImgThumbU155F1JOOKAQKP.JPG

Re dumb Asians: as usual, leave it to The Simpsons to put it in perspective:

A worker in 1909: You can't treat the working man this way. One day, we'll form a union and get the fair and equitable treatment we deserve! Then we'll go too far, and get corrupt and shiftless, and the Japanese will eat us alive!

Burns's grandfather: The Japanese? Those sandal-wearing goldfish-tenders? Bosh! Flimshaw!

A belated thanks for everyone's replies, btw.

I never met a non-Ruthenian who even knew what a Ruthenian was.

Are you a Ruthenian? I used to be fascinated by the way maps of the Austro-Hungarian Empire would show Ruthenes living somewhere, and then they seemed to stop existing as a separate group (at least in so far as maps are concerned).

It's funny how in Ireland there are a lot of Polish people around now, but because they are all i) better looking than we are and ii) harder working than we are, no one tells jokes about them. I bet they tell jokes about us, though... when they are all gathered together, plotting to take over... I know their sort.

I love Ruthenians (though I am not one.) A great film which deals with this topic is Jana Sevcikova's "Old Believers." It's actually three shortish and lovely films. One (the title film) about the Lipovani, who are Russians who rejected Orthodox Church reforms a few hundred years ago and settled in what's now Romania, on an isolated part of the Danube delta. They've kept a lot of strange traditions alive. The second short film is "Piemule," which is the story of a small group of people descended from Czechs who ended up in Romanian villages generations ago. And the last is "Jakub," about a now-deceased Ruthenian man who was moved to western Bohemia. The last is the best - it consists of many interviews with old people remembering Jakub - but they can't seem to agree on anything about him, even when he died. (I swear, some people say he died the previous year, others "twenty or more.") This says more about the timelessness of eastern European village life more than anything I've ever seen. All three movies are wonderfully shot, meditative but full of detail. And it's all on DVD from Netflix, as soon as I'm done with it!

I had never heard the term Ruthenian before reading this thread.

As for Polack, the correct spelling is Polak, which simply means "a Polish man" in Polish. The female equivalent is Polka.

Polack with a 'c' in it, if such a word existed, would be pronounced "polask".

Because so much of Dublin now features the word "Polski" on it, I suspect that people will start referring to Polish people as Polskis.

Support your local Polski Sklep, Vicar. Buy some kielbasy and check out the flaki.

I suspect that people will start referring to Polish people as Polskis

in london they already do

that's a bit like referring to a British person as "a British".

yep - who's dumb now?

certainly not the Polish person I know most well, the one who shares my home. She has a PhD :-)

i can't believe nobody's told the best polish joke of all time, from when the pope was polish:

a salesman visits the vatican and sees the pope proceeding down a corridor. "your holiness!" he cries, and falls at his feet. "yes my child" says the pope. the salesman raises himself up. "uh, well. haha um did you ever hear the one about the two polish priests?" "my son, of course you must know that i am polish myself" "ok i'll tell it real slow"

Or indeed:

Pope John Paul II gets to meet God who tells him that he is allowed to ask Him two questions. "OK", says the pope, "Will there ever be women priests in the Catholic church?". "well, not in your lifetime" God replies.

So the Pope asks "Will there ever be another Polish pope?" to which God replies, "Well, not in my lifetime".

I thought this thread would be about the story that was in the Metro this week, which I unfortunately can't find a link to, of a Polish community leader saying the British should start telling Polish jokes to help integrate the Poles into society!

that's a bit like referring to a British person as "a British".

so they should be called Polsks?