its so weird to me that like "polack jokes" were like, apparently a fairly common thing at least as recently as the late 90s, and yet like, totally disappeared, like, i was born in 1999 and i dont think ive ever heard a polack joke
I mean, I was born in the late ‘80s and I don’t recall seeing polack jokes in any media made after I was born. Doesn’t mean they didn’t exist, but I’m iffy on “fairly common.”
So in 1982 there was published a book called Truly Tasteless Jokes, full of just what you would expect from the title -- jokes about racial and ethnic minorities, the disabled, gays and lesbians, and so on. It was a huge bestseller and inspired a wave of sequels and imitations that lasted until the mid-eighties.
And that’s the last I remember of Polack jokes. After the publishing fad passed, they were gone. It was as if the books, by codifying an oral tradition, killed it.
(Funny that this trend never comes up when people are talking about 80s nostalgia.)
By the time I was hearing them the Polish angle was like a vestigial framing device keying you in that the premise was “design that defeats its purpose”