ABSTRACT
American jokes about Poles are both the newest and the oldest of ethnic jokes about stupidity. Yet the Polish joke cycle in the United States is also the oldest of its kind for it introduced a new style of joking about stupidity and gave a new vigor to the older traditions of ethnic joking about stupidity in other countries, such as Britain, which had languished in the 1950s. The very newness of the American stupidity jokes about Poles, however, has set them apart from the older traditions of ethnic joking about stupidity of other countries and, indeed, even of America itself. The collections of Polish jokes in American folklore archives show that the tellers have little awareness of the nature, existence or even location of the country from which the ancestors of the Polish Americans came. Numerically, ethnic jokes about the Poles are probably the most common of all American ethnic jokes.
