targets of ethnic jokes

[Robert Fitzke]

I had a friend in law school in the early 70s who neatly avoided aiming his
jokes at any particular group by saying, "How do you tell the bride at an
ethnic wedding? The jokes were funny, I suspect, because the listener filled
in his or her own "ethnic".

Bob


> >The Italian jokes of my downstate NY youth were Polish jokes upstate;
when I
> >came to Ohio they became WV jokes and on my Fulbright to Germany they
> >transmuted into Fries jokes.  Friesland (Frisia) is the narrow coastal
strip
> >of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark that borders the North Sea. In
> >Toulouse on a subsequent exchange I was told the French looked down on
the
> >Belgians but I heard no jokes at their expense.
> >
> >Ex:   Q: "How do you tell the bride at a [insert ethnic group here]
wedding?
> >A: She's the one with the clean T-shirt."
> >_________________________________
> >"Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber Boshaft ist er nicht"
> >--Albert Einstein
>
> --
> Dennis R. Preston
> Professor of Linguistics
> Department of Linguistics and Languages
> 740 Wells Hall A
> Michigan State University
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