From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!cmcl2!philabs!sdcsvax!phonlab!sdcatta!wa277 Newsgroups: net.jokes.d Title: Ethnic jokes Article-I.D.: sdcatta.450 Posted: Wed Jun 16 10:34:59 1982 Received: Sat Jun 19 04:59:44 1982 Now that this subgroup is in existence, I thought I'd begin by going over some old ground in a new way. When is an ethnic joke not a joke? When you're the "ethnic"? It doesn't always work that way. Since I'm a male WASP, I haven't often had the experience of being the target of ethnic humor. I'm a native Southern Californian, though, and am thus an interested party when it comes to "Californian" jokes. About a month ago someone sub- mitted a variation on the lightbulb joke, "How many Californians?"-- answer being, "None--Californians screw in a jacuzzi!" I thought this was great and have told it to everyone I know. It's when people tell Californian jokes as if they were *true* that I get upset. Recently a historian in an article in The American Scholar told the original California bulb joke ("One to screw it in, and N to share the exper- ience") as an illustration of how faddish and touchy-feely we on the West Coast are. That got to me. Which leads me to postulate that it is only when an ethnic joke is perceived as being a weapon of cultural warfare that we react angrily. There is a big difference between a Yiddish comic telling schlemiel jokes and twelve-year-old non-Jews snickering over jokes about avarice or big noses. (You might not agree, though, that membership in an ethnic group allows one to say anything one wants about the group. Self-directed racism exists just as surely as self-hate.) What I wonder is whether any joke that is any good is not always hostile towards somebody. Everybody knows that the average dirty joke disguises everything from Oedipal rage to castration fear; judging relations between the sexes on the basis of dirty jokes would lead you to conclude that we are a very sick society. Yet we all would agree that it is better to sublimate sexual drives in the form of dirty jokes than to act out violent fantasies in real life. I think that for most people mild ethnic jokes serve a similar purpose-- they let us get rid of our xenophobia and cultural frustrations in a relatively harmless way. Say, an idea just occurred to me. Steven Spielberg has just come out with another of his godawful apocalyptic "the aliens are coming and isn't it lovely" films, E.T. (Okay, Spielberg fans, lynch me. You'll find me on top of Devil's Tower singing an inane five-note melody at the top of my lungs.) Why not "extra-terrestrial" jokes? E.g.: Q: How many ET's does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: One, but first he spends an hour doing CPR to see if he can revive it. (Sorry, top of the head--you can all do better!) D. Sewell