ABSTRACT
Germans and German Americans have in the past often been in conflict with the Poles. Were there any truth in the hostility theory of humor it is just possible that German Americans in states such as Wisconsin where German and Polish communities have long lived alongside one another with something less than complete amity are the original begetters of the Polish joke. It is also possible that some of the earliest American Polack jokes were originally imported from Germany. Stupidity jokes were also told in the then German Silesia about two Polish coal miners called Antek and Franzek. The German-American displaced person who told both jokes had brought these jokes with her to America, presumably in the late 1940s, after she had fled westwards from the invading Russian army prior to emigrating to America. American Polish jokes cannot really be traced back to, nor do they in any sense express historic Old World hatreds of the Germans for the Poles.
