Polish joke

Last updated
Polish joke
Alternative name(s)Polack joke
Type of joke Ethnic joke
Target of joke Polish people
Language(s) English

A Polish joke is an English-language ethnic joke deriding Polish people, based on derogatory stereotypes. The Polish joke belongs in the category of conditional jokes, whose full understanding requires the audience to have prior knowledge of what a Polish joke is. As with all discriminatory jokes, Polish jokes depend on the listener's preconceived notions and antipathies. [1]

Contents

The relation between the internalized derogatory stereotypes about Polish people, and the persistence of ethnic jokes about them, is not easy to trace, though the jokes seem to be understood by many who hear them. [2] Sometimes an offensive term for a Pole, such as Polack , is used in the joke.

Example:

Q: How many Polacks does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Three – one to hold the bulb, and two to turn the ladder.

History

Some early 20th-century Polish jokes may have been told originally before World War II in disputed border regions such as Silesia, suggesting that Polish jokes did not originate in Nazi Germany but rather much earlier as an outgrowth of regional jokes rooted in historical discrimination of Poles in German-ruled areas, at least from the 18th-century Partitions of Poland, and actively pursued from the end of the 19th century by the government-backed German Eastern Marches Society, resulting in social class differences. [3] Nonetheless, these jokes were later fuelled by ethnic slurs disseminated by German warlords and National Socialist propaganda that attempted to justify Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles by representing Poles as dirty and relegating them as inferior on the basis of their not being German. [4] [5]

Polish Americans became the subject of derogatory jokes at the time when Polish immigrants moved to America in considerable numbers fleeing mass persecution at home perpetrated under Prussian [6] and Russian rule. [7] [8] They took the only jobs available to them, usually requiring physical labor. The same job-related stereotypes persisted even as Polish Americans joined the middle class in the mid 20th century. During the Cold War era, despite the sympathy in the US for Poland being subjected to communism, negative stereotypes about Polish Americans endured, mainly because of Hollywood/TV media involvement. [9] [10]

Some Polish jokes were brought to America by German displaced persons fleeing war-torn Europe in the late 1940s. [4] During the political transformations of the Soviet controlled Eastern bloc in the 1980s, the much earlier German anti-Polish sentiment—dating at least to the policies of Otto von Bismarck and the persecution of Poles under the German Empire—was revived in East Germany against Solidarność (Solidarity). Polish jokes became common, reminding some of the spread of such jokes under the Nazis. [11]

According to Christie Davies, American versions of Polish jokes are an unrelated "purely American phenomenon" and do not express the "historical Old World hatreds". [12] Researchers of the Polish American Journal argue instead that Nazi and Soviet propaganda shaped the perception of Poles. [13]

Negative stereotypes

United States

Debate continues whether the early Polish jokes brought to states like Wisconsin by German immigrants were directly related to the wave of American jokes of the early 1960s. [3] Since the late 1960s, Polish American organizations made continuous efforts to challenge the negative stereotyping of Polish people once prevalent in the US media. In the 1960s and 70s, television shows such as All in the Family , The Tonight Show , and Laugh-In often used jokes perceived by American Poles as demeaning. [10] The Polish jokes heard in the 1970s led the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to approach the U.S. State Department to complain, a move that ultimately had no effect. [10] The 2010 documentary film Polack by James Kenney explores the source of the Polish joke in America, tracing it through history and into contemporary politics. [14] [15] The depiction of Polish Americans in the play Polish Joke by David Ives has resulted in a number of complaints by the Polonia in the United States. [16]

The book Hollywood's War with Poland shows how Hollywood's World War II (and onwards) negative portrayal of Polish people as being "backward", helped condition the American people to see Polish people as having inferior intelligence. The book supports the Polish-American Journal's assertion that Hollywood historically was fertile ground for anti-Polish prejudice, based on Hollywood's left-wing and Soviet sympathies. [17]

The Polish American Congress Anti-Bigotry Committee was created in the early 1980s to fight anti-Polish sentiment, expressed for example in Polish jokes. Notable public cases include protests against the use of Polish jokes by Drew Carey (early 2000s) and Jimmy Kimmel (2013), both on the ABC network. [18]

Germany

Movie poster for 1999 film Heirate mir (Marry to Me, with broken German grammar and Faux Cyrillic 'Rs') about a stereotypical Polish cleaner played by Bolivian-born Verona Feldbusch HeirateMir FilmPoster.jpg
Movie poster for 1999 film Heirate mir (Marry to Me, with broken German grammar and Faux Cyrillic 'Rs') about a stereotypical Polish cleaner played by Bolivian-born Verona Feldbusch

In the 1990s, popular culture in Germany experienced a surge of Polish jokes. In their televisions shows, entertainers such as Harald Schmidt and Thomas Koschwitz made jokes about the Polish economy and about increased automobile thefts in Germany, attributed to Poles:

Q. Was ist der neueste Werbeslogan der Tourismus-Branche für Polen?
A. "Kommen Sie nach Polen – Ihr Auto ist schon da."

English translation:

Q. What is the latest slogan promoting tourism to Poland?
A. "Come to Poland! Your car is already there!"

The Bild tabloid employed stereotypical headlines about Poland. This triggered public outrage among German and Polish intellectuals, but in the latter half of the decade, fears of theft had even led to a decrease in German tourists visiting Poland. [19] [20] The greatest percentage of foreign tourists in Poland, exceeding 1.3 million annually, arrive from Germany. [21] In recent decades, it has been observed that the public image of Poland in Germany itself was largely shaped by stereotypical jokes. [22]

See also

Notes

  1. Ted Cohen (1999). Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters. University of Chicago Press. p. 21. ISBN   0-226-11230-6 . Retrieved 2009-09-10.
  2. Ted Cohen (1999). Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, p. 78. University of Chicago Press. ISBN   9780226112329 . Retrieved 2011-07-22.
  3. 1 2 Christie Davies, The Mirth of Nations. Page 176. Aldine Transaction, 2010, ISBN   978-1-4128-1457-7.
  4. 1 2 Tomasz Szarota, Goebbels: 1982 (1939–41): 16, 36-7, 274; 1978. Also: Tomasz Szarota: Stereotyp Polski i Polaków w oczach Niemców podczas II wojny światowej; Bibliografia historii polskiej – 1981. Page 162.
  5. Critique of Alan Dundes, professor of anthropology and folklore from University of California in Berkeley in The Mirth of Nations by Christie Davies
  6. Maciej Janowski, Frederick's "the Iroquois of Europe" (in) Polish liberal thought before 1918, Central European University Press, 2004, ISBN   963-9241-18-0 Accessed August 4, 2011.
  7. Liudmila Gatagova, "The Crystallization of Ethnic Identity in the Process of Mass Ethnophobias in the Russian Empire. (The Second Half of the 19th Century)." Archived 2011-07-24 at the Wayback Machine The CRN E-book. Accessed August 4, 2011.
  8. "January Uprising RSCI", The Real Science Index; in: "Joseph Conrad, March 12, 1857-August 3, 1924"; Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003 Archived May 29, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  9. "The Origin of the 'Polish Joke'," Archived 2010-09-28 at the Wayback Machine Polish American Journal, Boston New York.
  10. 1 2 3 Dominic Pulera, Sharing the Dream: White Males in Multicultural America Published 2004 by Continuum International Publishing Group, 448 pages. ISBN   0-8264-1643-8. Page 99.
  11. John C. Torpey, Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent Published 1995 by U of Minnesota Press. Page 82.
  12. Christie Davies, The Mirth of Nations ibidem. Page 181.
  13. "The Origin of the Polish Joke". Archived from the original on 2010-09-28. Retrieved 2010-11-14.
  14. IMDb entry for Polack, 2010 documentary
  15. Homepage of Polack 2010 documentary Archived 2011-02-08 at the Wayback Machine , including credits and press announcements. Archived 2015-10-07 at the Wayback Machine
  16. Marek Czarnecki, Commentary on the play "Polish Joke", posted at the American Council for Polish Culture website.
  17. Hollywood’s War with Poland, 1939–1945: A Review Archived 2012-01-22 at the Wayback Machine
  18. Milewski, Frank. "WWII and Holocaust: Just A Big Joke At Disney's ABC-TV". canadafreepress.com.
  19. Jäger-Dabek, Brigitte (2012). Polen: Eine Nachbarschaftskunde für Deutsche [Poland: A Neighbourhood Study for Germans] (in German). Ch. Links Verlag. p. 137. ISBN   978-3-86284-153-0.
  20. Lewandowska, Anna (2008). Sprichwort-Gebrauch heute: ein interkulturell-kontrastiver Vergleich von Sprichwörtern anhand polnischer und deutscher Printmedien [Today's Use of Proverbs: An intercultural constrastive Comparison of Proverbs using Polish and German Print Media] (in German). Peter Lang. pp. 258–259. ISBN   978-3-03911-655-3.
  21. Główny Urząd Statystyczny, Overnight stays in accommodation establishments in 2014 (PDF file, direct download 8.75 MB), Central Statistical Office (Poland), pp. 174–177 / 254. Warsaw 2015.
  22. Urban, Thomas (2003). Polen [Poland] (in German). C.H. Beck. p. 84. ISBN   978-3-406-44793-8.

Related Research Articles

<i>Volksdeutsche</i> Title for ethnic Germans in Nazi Germany

In Nazi German terminology, Volksdeutsche were "people whose language and culture had German origins but who did not hold German citizenship." The term is the nominalised plural of volksdeutsch, with Volksdeutsche denoting a singular female, and Volksdeutscher, a singular male. The words Volk and völkisch conveyed the meanings of "folk".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bloody Sunday (1939)</span> Massacre in Poland during the 1939 invasion by Nazi Germany

Bloody Sunday was a sequence of violent events that took place in Bydgoszcz, a Polish city with a sizable German minority, between 3 and 4 September 1939, during the German invasion of Poland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethnic joke</span> Joke based on assumptions about a specific ethnic group

An ethnic joke is a remark aiming at humor relating to an ethnic, racial or cultural group, often referring to an ethnic stereotype of the group in question for its punchline.

The Poles come from different West Slavic tribes living on territories belonging later to Poland in the early Middle Ages.

The Polish American Congress (PAC) is an American umbrella organization of Polish-Americans and Polish-American organizations. Its members include individuals as well as fraternal, educational, veterans, religious, cultural, social, business, and political organizations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Province of Upper Silesia</span> 1919–1945 province of Prussia, Germany

The Province of Upper Silesia was a province of the Free State of Prussia from 1919 to 1945. It comprised much of the region of Upper Silesia and was eventually divided into two government regions called Kattowitz (1939–1945), and Oppeln (1819–1945). The provincial capital was Oppeln (1919–1938) and Kattowitz (1941–1945), while other major towns included Beuthen, Gleiwitz, Hindenburg O.S., Neiße, Ratibor and Auschwitz, added in 1941. Between 1938 and 1941 it was reunited with Lower Silesia as the Province of Silesia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anti-Polish sentiment</span> Hostility, prejudice, or discrimination against Poland or people of Polish ethnicity

Polonophobia, also referred to as anti-Polonism or anti-Polish sentiment are terms for negative attitudes, prejudices, and actions against Poles as an ethnic group, Poland as their country, and their culture. These include ethnic prejudice against Poles and persons of Polish descent, other forms of discrimination, and mistreatment of Poles and the Polish diaspora.

German <i>AB-Aktion</i> in Poland

The 1940 AB-Aktion, a second stage of the Nazi German campaign of violence in Poland during World War II, aimed to eliminate the intellectuals and the upper classes of the Second Polish Republic across the territories slated for eventual annexation by the German Reich.

Żydokomuna is an anti-communist and antisemitic canard, or a pejorative stereotype, suggesting that most Jews collaborated with the Soviet Union in importing communism into Poland, or that there was an exclusively Jewish conspiracy to do so. A Polish language term for "Jewish Bolshevism", or more literally "Jewish communism", Żydokomuna is related to the "Jewish world conspiracy" myth.

<i>Selbstschutz</i> Military unit

Selbstschutz is the name given to different iterations of ethnic-German self-protection units formed both after the First World War and in the lead-up to the Second World War.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nazi war crimes in occupied Poland during World War II</span> WWII war crimes

Crimes against the Polish nation committed by Nazi Germany and Axis collaborationist forces during the invasion of Poland, along with auxiliary battalions during the subsequent occupation of Poland in World War II, included the genocide of millions of Polish people, especially the systematic extermination of Jewish Poles. These mass killings were enacted by the Nazis with further plans that were justified by their racial theories, which regarded Poles and other Slavs, and especially Jews, as racially inferior Untermenschen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Valley of Death (Bydgoszcz)</span> Mass murder of Polish civilians, 1939

Valley of Death in Fordon, Bydgoszcz, northern Poland, is a site of Nazi German mass murder committed at the beginning of World War II and a mass grave of 1,200–1,400 Poles and Jews murdered in October and November 1939 by the local German Selbstschutz and the Gestapo. The murders were a part of Intelligenzaktion in Pomerania, a Nazi action aimed at the elimination of the Polish intelligentsia in Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia, which included the former Pomeranian Voivodeship. It was part of a larger genocidal action that took place in all German occupied Poland, code-named Operation Tannenberg.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939–1946)</span>

In the aftermath of the German and Soviet invasion of Poland, which took place in September 1939, the territory of Poland was divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviets had ceased to recognise the Polish state at the start of the invasion. Since 1939 German and Soviet officials coordinated their Poland-related policies and repressive actions. For nearly two years following the invasion, the two occupiers continued to discuss bilateral plans for dealing with the Polish resistance during Gestapo-NKVD Conferences until Germany's Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, in June 1941.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Germany–Poland relations</span> Bilateral relations

The bilateral relations between Poland and Germany have been marked by an extensive and complicated history.

<i>Intelligenzaktion</i> Plan of extermination of Polish intelligentsia by German troops in 1939

The Intelligenzaktion, or the Intelligentsia mass shootings, was a series of mass murders which was committed against the Polish intelligentsia early in the Second World War (1939–45) by Nazi Germany. The Germans conducted the operations in accordance with their plan to Germanize the western regions of occupied Poland, before their territorial annexation to the German Reich.

<i>Intelligenzaktion Pommern</i> 1939–1940 massacres in Pomerania committed by Nazi Germany

The Intelligenzaktion Pommern was a Nazi German operation aimed at the eradication of the Polish intelligentsia in Pomeranian Voivodeship and the surrounding areas at the beginning of World War II. It was part of a larger genocidal Intelligenzaktion that took place across most of Nazi-occupied western Poland in the course of Operation Tannenberg, purposed to install Nazi officials from SiPo, Kripo, Gestapo and SD at the helm of a new administrative machine.

Racism in Poland in the 20th and 21st centuries has been a subject of extensive study. Ethnic minorities made up a greater proportion of the country's population from the founding of the Polish state through the Second Polish Republic than in the 21st century, when government statistics show 94% or more of the population self-reporting as ethnically Polish.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">World War II casualties of Poland</span> Casualties of Polish citizens during World War II

Around 6 million Polish citizens perished during World War II: about one fifth of the entire pre-war population of Poland. Most of them were civilian victims of the war crimes and the crimes against humanity which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union committed during their occupation of Poland. Approximately half of them were Polish Jews who were killed in The Holocaust. Statistics for Polish casualties during World War II are divergent and contradictory. This article provides a summary of the estimates of Poland's human losses in the war as well as a summary of the causes of them.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Occupation of Poland (1939–1945)</span> Occupation of Poland during WWII

The occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II (1939–1945) began with the Invasion of Poland in September 1939, and it was formally concluded with the defeat of Germany by the Allies in May 1945. Throughout the entire course of the occupation, the territory of Poland was divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (USSR), both of which intended to eradicate Poland's culture and subjugate its people. In the summer-autumn of 1941, the lands which were annexed by the Soviets were overrun by Germany in the course of the initially successful German attack on the USSR. After a few years of fighting, the Red Army drove the German forces out of the USSR and crossed into Poland from the rest of Central and Eastern Europe.

In the contemporary English language, the noun Polack is a derogatory, mainly North American, reference to a person of Polish origin. It is an anglicisation of the Polish masculine noun Polak, which denotes a person of Polish ethnicity and typically male gender. However, the English loanword is considered an ethnic slur.

References