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