QUESTION: Why do Americans tell Polish jokes?
ANSWER: Didn't use to. The Irish were long the brunt of ethnic jokes in which the antagonist was rendered as bumbling, dense, unclean, etc. Irish jokes declined after World War II and disappeared almost entirely by the early 1960s, when an Irish-American was president of the United States. Then Polish jokes became standard. But only in America, we must quickly add, other countries have their own favorite whipping dogs.The French tell jokes about Belgians.
In Eastern Canada, especially Ontario, the joke is on Newfoundlanders, a.k.a. "Newfies." In Western Canada they mock Ukrainians - who also get grief from Russians.
In India, Sikhs are the target. In Brazil, the Portuguese. Israelies joke about Kurdish Jews and Swedes yank the chains of Finns and Norwegians.
Brits, Australians and New Zealanders still make Irish jokes.
And the Irish joke about Kerry men, residents of a part of Ireland.
The list goes on and on and reveals a certain pattern: The victims are usually immigrants or minority groups who are partially but not totally assimilated into mainstream society. Different, but not too different.
The Irish came to America in large numbers in the 1800s, the Poles in the early 1900s. Thus the Irish had a head start in losing their hyphenated status.
"The Irish moved up, assimilated, intermarried with other ethnic groups and in time became Americanized to the point where only excessive Catholicism and alcohol consumption remained as distinctive traits that could be made the subject of ethnic jokes," writes Christie Davies in "Ethnic Humor Around the World: A Comparative Analysis." "The groups who succeeded the Irish as the butts of ethnic jokes about stupidity were the descendants of the unskilled and illiterate immigrants from the poorest parts of Europe and Southern Europe who had migrated to America in the decades before World War I."
The decline of Irish jokes and rise of Polish jokes in the early '60s is perhaps a compliment to both the Irish and the Poles, Davies writes. "The Irish are no longer ambiguous enough to be joked about, the Poles are no longer alien enough to be excluded from jokes . . . Americans, like everyone else, tell jokes that export stupidity to the periphery of their society, and from the 1960s they used the Poles as a safe if somewhat anachronistic marker of the social boundary of American society."
QUESTION: Why do men tell more jokes than women?
ANSWER: Before the Sweeping Generality Police bust down the door of the Why bunker and hogtie the lot of us, let's make it clear that we're not saying that women don't tell jokes, or are humor deficient, or anything like that. But it does seem to be true that, in general, men tell more of your standard guy-goes-to-a-psychiatrist jokes, and are more likely to keep reeling off the one-liners and wearing lamp shades on their heads in a desperate attempt to be the life of the party.
For example, when we conducted an informal survey of readers and asked them to tell us a joke, men were twice as likely as women to come up with one on the spot. Many more women than men said that they didn't tell jokes, period.
Here are two possible reasons for this phenomenon.
1. Jokes often involve cruelty, humiliation, mockery. "Guy goes to a doctor. `You're dying,' says the doctor. `I want a second opinion,' says the guy. Doctor says, `OK, you're ugly, too.' That's a male joke, through and through. Men are meaner. Women are traditionally trained from childhood to be NICE.
2. Many women were instructed as they grew up to let men take center stage. Let men be the joke-tellers. Women aren't SUPPOSED to be as funny. A woman who truly is the life of the party runs the risk of being labeled "loud" or "obnoxious." There are different standards for different genders.
The advice book "Always Ask a Man," by Arlene Dahl, published in 1965, says, "The successful female never lets her competence compete with her femininity. Never upstage a man. Don't top his jokes even if you have to bite your tongue to keep from doing it. Never launch loudly into your own opinions . . . instead, draw out his ideas to which you can gracefully add your footnotes from time to time."
Some women still follow this pattern, whether consciously or not. Harriet Goldhor Lerner wrote in "The Dance of Anger," published in 1985, that the ancient rule that "men are the boss" still lurks in the minds of many women. The source of that notion is, perversely, the belief that men are in fact so pathetically weak that they need to be constantly bolstered, and that this can be done by women feigning weakness.
As Lerner put it, sarcastically, "The weaker sex must protect the stronger sex from recognizing the strength of the weaker sex lest the stronger sex feel weakened by the strength of the weaker sex."
THE MAILBAG:
Lois Scanlan, who identifies herself as essentially the top aquarium expert in the Solar System, says the bubbles that go up through the tank don't put oxygen in the water, as we recently asserted. Instead, those bubbles merely disrupt the surface of the water, which allows tiny oxygen molecules to enter from the air, nitrogen to escape, and keeps the fish alive, and good stuff like that.
Fred S., a former voice teacher, informs us of our great ignorance in using the term "vocal chords." It LOOKS right, but it ain't. The correct spelling is "cords." (As in, "strikes a sympathetic cord.")
An anonymous Detroit person asks, "Why is there no holiday in August?" The answer, Mr. Anon, should be obvious: Everyone's on vacation then. No one works. Therefore there's no reason to have a holiday. Also nothing ever happened in August except Nixon's resignation and Hiroshima. That we recall.
Send questions to Joel Achenbach, Tropic Magazine, The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL 33132.