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A Polish joke is an English-language ethnic joke deriding Polish people, based on derogatory . The Polish joke belongs in the category of , 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 Prejudice and antipathies.
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. Sometimes an offensive term for a Pole, such as Polack, is used in the joke.
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Polish Americans became the subject of derogatory jokes at the time when Polish immigrants moved to the United States in considerable numbers fleeing mass persecution at home perpetrated under PrussiaMaciej Janowski, Frederick's "the Iroquois of Europe" (in) Polish liberal thought before 1918, Central European University Press, 2004, Accessed August 4, 2011. and Russian rule.Liudmila Gatagova, "The Crystallization of Ethnic Identity in the Process of Mass Ethnophobias in the Russian Empire. (The Second Half of the 19th Century)." The CRN E-book. Accessed August 4, 2011. "January Uprising RSCI", The Real Science Index; in: "Joseph Conrad, March 12, 1857-August 3, 1924"; Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003 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. "The Origin of the 'Polish Joke'," Polish American Journal, Boston New York.Dominic Pulera, Sharing the Dream: White Males in Multicultural America Published 2004 by Continuum International Publishing Group, 448 pages. . Page 99.
Some Polish jokes were brought to the United States by German fleeing war-torn Europe in the late 1940s. During the political transformations of the Soviet Union 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. John C. Torpey, Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent Published 1995 by U of Minnesota Press. Page 82.
According to Christie Davies, American versions of Polish jokes are an unrelated "purely American phenomenon" and do not express the "historical Old World hatreds".Christie Davies, The Mirth of Nations ibidem. Page 181. Researchers of the Polish American Journal argue instead that Nazi and Soviet propaganda shaped the perception of Poles.
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. Hollywood’s War with Poland, 1939–1945: A Review
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.
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. The greatest percentage of foreign tourists in Poland, exceeding 1.3 million annually, arrive from Germany.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. In recent decades, it has been observed that the public image of Poland in Germany itself was largely shaped by stereotypical jokes.
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