Explain this joke to me please?

[tabitha2]

When we were engaged, I told Kimberly Coghlan that I was 1/4 Jewish on my dad's side. In fact, I remarked, they were Polish Jews. So that would make me 1/4 Polack...

Without missing a beat or taking a breath she says "from the shoulders up?"

Apparently this is a riot according to the folks on Perry's FB.Kim is a ''fire cracker'' for this it seems

[salsa]

I think it's like when I did my first funeral with an older (and extraordinarily nice male) pastor who, in a condescending way that I accepted because it was meant well, told me, "funeral customs change every 100 miles." I asked, "starting where?" He just looked at me like, "huh?" and didn't get the joke I was trying to make.

17 years later, I still think I was pretty clever.

[SpeakNow]

I feel like this has something to do with how attractive/unattractive polish people are considered

[missbrooklyn]

I thought it had something to do with Polish people being stupid, ie, is the quarter of you that's Polish in your head? Actually, he was in fact not 1/4 Jewish, as Judaism inherits from the mother's side, not the father's. I will say that he was all kinds of stupid.

mr. LongIsland is Polish, btw.

[GeoBQn]

He can be 1/4 Jewish in the sense that Polish Jews are Ashkenazi, which is an ethnicity (with its own DNA markers, predisposition to specific genetic illnesses, etc.), but Ashkenazi Jews really don't consider themselves to be the same ethnicity of the people in the country their ancestors came from. I'm descended from Jews who came from Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, but that is not the same as being Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian.

[missbrooklyn]

Very true, GeoBQn. He can be a little Galitzianer, just like me and the mister! And it's hard to know what country anyone came from, because WWII really did a number on country boundaries and such. But if he is identifying his father's family's religion, not ethnicity, well, he's just wrong.

[Rosa]

I would guess the joke was about stereotypes of Polish people being stupid. In the Midwest there's still remnants of old stereotypes (like, I was raised with enough Polack jokes that I still kind of find -ski names inherently funny. And my family's full of them.)

Those stereotypes go back to the early 20th century when there were a lot of central European immigrants, many of whom didn't speak any English. If you look at English-language newspapers from the time (remember this is the time of popular eugenics and bizarre race theories) you can see people arguing about whether "the Slavs" or "the Finns" or "the Poles" are inherently less able to adapt to American life - go back into the late 19th century and there are sometimes assertions that central Europeans are unsuited to trade unions because they will always be unskilled labor.

[dawbs]

I thought it had something to do with Polish people being stupid, ie, is the quarter of you that's Polish in your head? *snip*

That's what I immediately thought.

It's come to my attention recently that "pollacks are stupid" isn't actually common 'knowledge' and that pollack jokes aren't 'done' anymore.

I"m not sure when we got more enlightened :)

[Beammeup]

Apparently this is a riot according to the folks on Perry's FB.Kim is a ''fire cracker'' for this it seems

Hey, he has something in common with Harrison Ford. Not too Shabby. 8-)

And I don't get the original joke, so I used Adam Sandler's.

[pomology]

He can be 1/4 Jewish in the sense that Polish Jews are Ashkenazi, which is an ethnicity (with its own DNA markers, predisposition to specific genetic illnesses, etc.), but Ashkenazi Jews really don't consider themselves to be the same ethnicity of the people in the country their ancestors came from. I'm descended from Jews who came from Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, but that is not the same as being Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian.

Yeah. This.

I also totally don't get Kim's joke.

[thoughtful]

That's what I immediately thought.

It's come to my attention recently that "pollacks are stupid" isn't actually common 'knowledge' and that pollack jokes aren't 'done' anymore.

I"m not sure when we got more enlightened :)

I was happy to see that several people here didn't know about that stereotype.

I think it was replaced by "blonde" jokes. So women with light-colored hair get insulted instead. Not exactly a step forward!

In performance or literature, it has historically been handled by having a character who made really clueless mistakes -- The Stupids books, Gracie Allen's onstage persona, Homer Simpson, etc. So, the jokes can be made without stereotyping of a group (although it can certainly still lead to that).

In general, I think stupidity jokes are not very funny, but every now and then one catches my fancy. I just take out the stereotype, and insert an imaginary character, as in the above examples.

For example:

I knew a guy who was so clueless, he thought "farm" was spelled "E-I-E-I-O."

:D

[Terrie]

What's interesting to me is that while humor is generally very cultural, there's always one group or another seen as dumb. It's almost universal.