Monday, April 02, 2018

Are Ethnic Jokes OK Again?

If the Education Department is paying for whiteness studies, talks on toxic masculinity, demands for some to apologize for their white privilege and the patriarchy, is it OK now to go back to ethnic jokes? Maybe we've moved on to he point where all we can do is hate straight, white men, but can't laugh at ourselves. That would be sad.

I'm old enough to not have been indoctrinated into the culture of the constantly-offended. Some of my favorite accents and jokes make fun of myself and my heritage. There's so much good material out there, too!

I hope we can go back to the jokes. I miss listening to guys like Jackie Mason. The video below, by the way, seems to have been delisted by YouTube. When I searched for it by it's key, 6aJ63JhvpTA, it didn't come up for easy insertion by Blogger. My bet is that the peach-fuzzed censors at Google thought it was triggering. Oh well.


3 comments:

Mostly Nothing said...

A few non-related comments.

Remember when Google's corporate motto was "Do no evil"? When was the last time you heard that?

Which part of the the constitution guarantees our right to never be offended? Or more specifically SJW's right to not be offended.

I love Sven and Ole jokes.

A few years ago I was offended by my Monnrsota Vikings. There play offended my heritage. :-)

Francis W. Porretto said...

Ethnic jokes have always been okay. They're based on caricatures -- patterns easily observable in ethnic communities. Here's one for you.

A woman was leaning out her third floor tenement window, straining to wash the outside of the windowpane, when she lost her balance and fell. Fortunately, she fell into a garbage can and was dazed but unhurt. She did, however, startle a passing old Chinese man. The old Chinaman merely collected himself, shrugged, and muttered to himself:

"Amellicans velly wasteful. Woman good for ten years yet."

Hope you had a joyous Easter!

Timothy Eisele said...

I dunno, ethnic jokes have always been a problem for me. We moved into a predominantly Polish community (probably 75%) when I was 10, and the people of Polish descent (including some of the teachers) were constantly telling "Dumb Polack" jokes to anybody who would listen. But, only the Poles could tell them. The rest of us were told that if *we* told them, there would be Trouble.

And, while probably nobody would have cared if I had told ethnic jokes about *my* ethnicity, this was still not all that long after WWII, and the few German ethnic jokes involved goose-stepping, authoritarian, genocidal maniacs. Which honestly aren't particularly funny. More horrifying, in fact.

So, I never really got all that into ethnic jokes.