#104 - Ruining the Polish Joke

How many Polacks does it take
to ruin the Polish joke?

2/11/07 (#104)

Adolph Hitler had the worst looking mustache in history. Just a 1-inch-wide vertical stripe of hair on his upper lip, it could easily be mistaken as over-ambitious nostril hair, yet the man managed to make it his signature look. (A fact that must make Charlie Chaplin roll in his grave.) Not surprisingly, that so-called mustache died along with him---it is so distinctly a "Hitler mustache" that outside of adult Halloween costumes and an occasional TV sight gag, it has never been seen again. (I doubt anyone wants to repeatedly explain to every chatty sales clerk, "No, I am actually not sympathetic to the mastermind of the world's most infamous genocide---I just think it looks sharp.")

As facial hair goes, there are limits to a man's available fashion statements. Beard, mustache, goatee, side burns---excepting a few varieties of each of those styles, there's nothing more that can be done with the bristly thatch that grows on our faces. Folks like Salvador Dali and Fu Manchu may push the tonsorial envelope to the limits of its tensile strength, but even those fashion deviants fit under the primary categories with the simple addition of an extra adjective: Dali's is not technically a "handlebar mustache", but it's close enough to call it a "zany handlebar mustache"; Fu Manchu managed to get a minor beard-and-mustache modification named in his honor, but it's little more than a "pimped-out goatee." Yet as small as the list of options is, Hitler single-handedly managed to make it shorter, scratching one off for perpetuity.

This is no small feat for a single person---to permanently close one avenue of the cultural road map. I'm not recommending Hitler get a round of applause for his inadvertent efforts, but the elimination of that miscarriage of facial fashion is a noteworthy feat. Yet such is the life of extremely notable individuals, becoming two-dimensional caricatures of their most newsworthy achievements while their lesser items of note are left out of the picture---in Hitler's case, it's no wonder that his heinous facial grooming habits got less attention than his more-heinous national grooming campaign. A similar thing happens when a person's positive accomplishments dwarf their minor victories---Lech Walesa's resume, cluttered with bullet points about leading a shipyard strike that precipitated the demise of Poland's communist government, becoming Time Magazine's "Man of the Year", and eventually winning the Polish Presidency, has little room for noting his essential role in the near-elimination of the Polish joke.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, the Poles were the consistent brunt of jokes involving stupidity:

"How do you get a one-armed Polack out of a tree? Wave to him."
"How many Polacks does it take to screw in a light bulb? Four---one to hold the bulb and three to turn the ladder."

In fact, most of these jokes are hardly "Polish" at all---they are generic jokes into which the user installs their victim of choice, versatile put-downs that allow any demographic to be ridiculed. Regional biases personalized these all-purpose put-downs for whatever ethnic group was amassing a sizable regional population---I recall visiting cousins in Fall River and hearing Portuguese jokes; in Massachusetts I heard more Irish zingers; and in Maine the victim of choice was anyone who wasn't from Maine. (The natives used to half-joke that there are two types of people: Mainers, and people "from away"; doesn't matter if it's London, England or New London, Connecticut, you're just from away.*) Yet somehow, there was a consensus that the Polish were the punch-line champions for such humor, the most fitting fools for a one-liner like, "Did you hear they had to close the Polish National Library? Someone stole the book."

Because these jokes is so universally malleable, there are some who argue that it's "just a joke", that someone needs to be the brunt and it's not a commentary on a particular people or culture to star in such chestnuts. But if that's true, why the dearth of Brazilian jokes? And why have the Dutch been historically spared from such barbs? (Ironic that the Poles may have become the de facto brunt of the "dumb" one-liner because Americans weren't smart enough to learn geography.) Imagine a joke that begins, "An American, a Russian, and an Icelander walk into a bar"---it's up in the air as to what could happen, the punch line a mystery until the listener gets more information.** But change the preface to, "An American, a Russian, and a Pole walk into a bar" and you know right away who is going to play the fool. (The Russian might be mimed with a cartoon Kremlin accent, but he'll be free and clear when the wisecrack detonates.)

Whatever the cause of the Poles rise to punch line prominence, Lech Walesa, with help from Polish-bonn Pope John Paul II (elected to head the Roman Catholic church in 1978,) put an end to that. Walesa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, having proved himself as a courageous David to the Communist Goliath, a tireless champion of the underdog who more than spoke of freedom---he risked all to earn it. Walesa provided the world with a positive, powerful icon of the Polish people----hardly the image that come to mind when you think, "Have you heard about the Polish cocktail? It's Perrier and water." After Walesa, if you cracked a knee-slapper about Polish schools, in place of guffaws you'd get an indignant comment like, "Well you try learning when the Soviet Block is breathing down your neck." Lech did more to protect the Polish people from ridicule than anyone in history ever has. It's time he got the credit he deserves. (Consider that no matter how talented and influential, no blond in history has ever been able to stifle the ever-popular blond joke.)

The shift in the international humor balance that Walesa initiated begs the question, "Who has stepped up to fill the ethnic joke vacuum?" The French make semi-regular appearances in the American one-liner vernacular, but it's a starring role usually cast as retribution for their refusal to capitulate to America's political will, making such flare-ups wreak of pettiness, not jocularity. Frankly, political correctness of the 1990's and globalization of the 2000's has been very bad for the ethnic joke---such so-called humor is simply a hard sell in the 21st century. And while the dearth of ethnic jokes is certainly a positive step in the progress of humanity, it has been nothing but bad news for politicians, those perennial bloomers on the American humor landscape that garnered no protection from either political correctness or globalization. In fact, about the only solace many politicians can find is that at least they're not blond.

* "From away" is a phrase with far-reaching comprehensiveness---even if you were born in Maine, if your folks were from away, then you are still from away. As the an old Maine adage goes, "If a cat has kittens in the oven, you don't call 'em biscuits."

** I admit, in jokes such as these, we all know that the third character will be the fool, just as we know that if Captain Kirk, Doctor McCoy and a red-shirted ensign named "Smith" beam down from the Enterprise, Smith's career path in Starfleet Command is about to come to a gruesome halt.

Thanks to my friend Bruce Morritt, who spoke the wry observation that inspired this column.

©2007 wpreagan