Those crazy foreigners! (Part II)
July 24th, 2007Warning: Contains obscene situations. If you get offended easily, please skip this post.
One reason I like to drink is it loosens up other people. I’m already pretty loose, so I don’t need alcohol. Other people sometimes do.
I worked with this one Russian guy and he was always serious at work. The good thing about the Russians is that they rarely turn down booze. So I got “Ivan” nice and liquored up, and got him to tell me some jokes.
Ivan said in his part of Russia, they make fun of two groups of people - Jews, and Ukrainians. Well, I already posted a Jewish jokes on my old blog, and the jokes overlapped too much. However, I found the Ukrainian ones hilarious because they sound a lot like our “redneck” jokes.
How do Ukrainians put on their underwear?
Yellow in the front, brown in the back.
Why do little Ukrainian girls put a fish in their underwear?
So they can be like big Ukrainian girls.
Ivan was just about to tell me a third Ukrainian joke when someone else from the company came up to us and ruined the fun. We worked in a big corporation, so he knew if he told these Ukrainian jokes to anyone else there besides me, he’d probably have to watch that HR sensitivity video.
So, so much for Ukrainian jokes. I’ll have to get another Russian drunk to hear more. And don’t worry, I’ll share. 
Here in Detroit, I grew up with Polish jokes, but then the Former Father had to go to Minneapolis for work and he came home with Norwegian jokes. I was still in grade school, but I thought it interesting because I thought everybody told Polish jokes. That was my first experience with the idea of demographics.
We have a Russian friend here that is a few years younger than us. Maybe I will post about him in the next few days but anyway he is just plain weird. So I know what you are talking about them being up tight. That was good though.
Kathleen - I used to know tons of Polish jokes. When political correctness came around, all the Polish jokes changed to blonde jokes. I don’t understand why it’s ok to make fun of blondes but not ok to make fun of Polish. That doesn’t make sense.
Where I’m at now, we don’t have any Norwegian jokes. I’d love to hear some. I used to live in Chicago and we had a lot of Italian jokes there.
Tweety - Well, I know you don’t drink, but they’re a lot more loosened up and not so up tight when they drink. When my former co-worker was sober, he was just straight business. No smiles, jokes, or anything. When the booze started pouring, he became human. It was weird.
We have four here and they’re the same way - straight up business. I haven’t taken any of them drinking yet.
I think Kathleen raises a good point (not sure that she intended this, but I’m going to attribute the point to her anyway) - racist jokes are bad, because the impressionable ppl hearing them often believe the stereotype. It’s not because they’re dumb kids, but because you learn and are a brain sponge at a young age, especially when older ppl who are looked up to are doing the talking, and everyone in the room is laughing along with them. A very dangerous, subtle, yet common way to propagate the ignorance of racism. That is why I propose that everyone should make fun of themselves. The kind of humor I enjoy most is that which pokes fun at me, and the stereotypes to which I belong - pretentious intellectuals, computer savvy gurus, ppl w/amazingly awesome musical taste, etc. If the majority of jokes came from ppl who are themselves well within the humor bomb-blast radius, we’d have a good decrease in ignorance and racism.
It’s amazing how the same old jokes circulate the world. The only thing that varies, is the ethnicity.
Badman - Stereotypes are made to be proven wrong. And I’d rather live in a world with Free Speech and the ability to laugh than oversensitivity. I’ve laughed many times to jokes that involve one of my many ethnicities, and never once got offended.
Tshsmom - What’s really funny is there’s always someone calling someone else dumb. “My people aren’t dumb. It’s those people over there that are dumb.” Thus, come the Polish/Ukrainian/Turkish/Black Sea People/Redneck/Texas/Arkansas/blonde/etc that are all the same jokes. What’s really funny is I just learned recently that non-Sikhs in India make fun of the Sikhs.
I knew a French kid who told Belgian jokes. They were pretty funny.
The trouble with the Russians telling Jewish jokes is that they have a historical tendency to follow them up with pogroms.
Yonder - True about the Russians. I’ve been reading some horror stories lately about what happened during WWII in Russia.
As for the Belgians, they do make good beer. Even Dave realizes that, and he’s the farthest thing from a seasoned beer drinker.
My uncle lived in Ohio, and told Kentuckian jokes which sounded just like Polish and Norwegian jokes.
Tshsmom - That’s funny. I talked to a girl from Vermont and they told Maine jokes that sounded like the same jokes Texans made about Louisianans and folks from Arkansas.
Today, I asked an Assyrian friend who they make fun of and she replied the Kurds.
Yeah… my great grandmother’s uncles, the one was a rabbi. the other specialized in maiming other Jewish men so that they wouldn’t get drafted as cannon fodder in the Tsar’s wars. Basically it was better to lose a hand or an eye than your life. And being drafted was tame compared to the pogroms. The Nazis and the Commies weren’t nearly the first to take aim at the Jews of Eastern Europe. That goes back centuries.
The Belgian joke I remember:
A Belgian walks into the library and asks the librarian ‘Do you have a cigarette?’ She replies, ‘Sir, this is a library.’ He says, ‘Oh (whispering) do you have a cigarette?’
The dreaded “Sensitivity” video.
I’m picturing that scene from A Clockwork Orange.
Ben O.
That is how Victor is too. Just to serious. The only time I see hime laughing is when he is winning chess games with J. I just dont get it.
This is my first time at your site since it moved away from Blogger. Your warning at the top of this post sucked me in. On a much cruder level than ethnicity jokes, it cracks me up to hear speakers of other languages mimic the accent of American English.
Yonder - Wikipedia about a month ago had some featured articles on a mass gravesite found in Russia. I read up on it and clicked some of the links, and had no idea. It was really sick.
That Belgian joke made its rounds around work. Thanks.
Ben - I had problems watching that scene. Very disturbing.
Tweety - Russians definitely are good at chess. I refuse to challenge a Russian at chess.
Jessica - Heh. Yeah, that’s pretty funny. Even funnier when they tell jokes.
I wasn’t making the point Badman thought, but I agree with him, but also agree that too much oversensitivity is making this world a much worse place. Norwegian jokes in MN were just like Polish jokes in Detroit…same as Kentuckian jokes in Ohio (apparently), etc. I think 95% of my friends here in Detroit are Polish and they make fun of themselves all the time. “What can I say, I’m Polish.” is said all the time to explain something they said or did.