Polish jokes are jokes told to make fun of or disparage Polish people. Some of the earliest Polish jokes, also called Polack jokes – in reference to an ethnic slur – might 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 a lot earlier, as an outgrowth of regional jokes rooted in historical social class differences.[1] Nonetheless, these jokes were later fuelled by ethnic slurs disseminated by German warlords and National Socialist propaganda which attempted to justify the Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles by presenting them as dirty and relegating as inferior on the basis of not being German.[2][3] According to Davies, American versions of Polish jokes are an unrelated "purely American phenomenon" and do not express the "historical Old World hatreds".[4] This view is challenged by the Polish American Journal researchers[5] who argue that Nazi and Soviet propaganda echoed the perception of Poles around the world.
During the political transformations of the Soviet controlled Eastern block in the 1980s, the much earlier German anti-Polish sentiment dating back 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.[6]
Some Polish jokes were brought to America by German displaced persons fleeing war-torn Europe in the late 1940s.[2] Ethnic jokes about "new immigrants" may play on various negative stereotypes; in the case of early Polish jokes told by Americans, remarks on intelligence was a particularly frequent cliché. [7] An example of a Polish joke told by TV media was: "Why can't they make ice cubes in Poland anymore? -- Because someone lost the recipe."
Polish migration from the dismantled Polish state throughout the 19th century was considerable due to ethnic discrimination and unemployment on traditionally Polish lands (by the German and Russian empires).[8] Polish Americans became the subject of derogatory jokes at the time when Polish immigrants came to America in considerable numbers fleeing mass persecution at home perpetrated by Frederick the Great,[9] and Tsar Nicholas I.[10][11] They were taking 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 mid 20th century. "These degrading stereotypes were far from harmless. The constant derision, often publicly disseminated through the mass media, caused serious identity crises, feeling of inadequacy, and low self-esteem for many Polish Americans." During the Cold War era, despite the sympathy in the US for Poland being subjected to communism, negative stereotypes about Polish Americans endured, partly because of the Hollywood/TV media involvement.[12][13]
There is a debate 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.[1] Since the late 1960s, Polish American organizations made continuous effort to challenge the negative stereotyping of the Polish people once prevalent in U.S. media. In the 1960s & 70's TV shows like All in the Family, The Tonight Show, and Laugh-In often used jokes received by American Poles as demeaning.[13] 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 which ultimately had no effect.[13] 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 US.[16]
A hypothesis proposed by Prof. Roger Kovaciny, Ternopil, Ukraine, is that the Polish joke became popular in the United States because the Polish emigrant community was the first large group of white immigrants to America who had a great deal of trouble learning English, relatively distinct from Polish in linguistic terms. All other white immigrants spoke languages that were much more closely related to English in both vocabulary and grammar. Since all other white immigrant groups were from languages spoken on the coast of Europe, their languages had borrowed and donated many words from and to English via ocean trade; and all the Slavonic languages have a quite different grammar from other European languages, including such factors as the perfective and imperfective verb aspects and the lack of perfect tenses. They also have different alphabets and phonemes.
In support of this hypothesis are these facts: First, the countries neighboring Poland do not generally tell Polish jokes, and cannot understand why Americans consider Poles any more amusing than, say, Russians or Portuguese. Secondly, no other English-speaking country tells Polish jokes--not England, not Australia, not even Canada. Third, in Canada a parallel situation developed, and the jokes told there are about Ukrainians. Ukraine's neighbors do not tell Ukrainian jokes, and Americans, British and Australians do not see why Ukrainians should be considered intellectually challenged--but Ukrainians are a large and very visible minority in Canada, and, like Polish-Americans, they had much more trouble learning to speak English than other groups of white immigrants. Since neither Americans nor Canadians have any idea why Polish or Ukrainian would be harder to learn than, say, French, German, Spanish or Italian, they assumed that the Poles and Ukrainians were intellectually challenged compared to other white people and made them the butt of jokes. Since they were considered mentally backward, they also had trouble getting good jobs and were largely restricted to low-paying manual labour and dirty jobs, and were not as quick as other groups to be able to afford running hot water and washing machines. Of course, once any group becomes the butt of jokes the scope of those jokes is likely to spread and include morally questionable humor as well--although slurs on the sexual morality of Poles and Ukrainians are completely undeserved.
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