Tag Archives: dark humor

The Polack who shot his dog

Q: Did you hear about the Polack that shot his dog?

A: He found out his wife had had an affair with his best friend.

My informant first heard this joke in the 1970’s when spending time with friends he had made while working for a Southern Californian electric company.  They were sitting around and decided tell each other all of the Polack jokes they knew.  This joke, like every other Polack jokes, capitalizes on the historical American conception of the Polish as dim-witted and uneducated.  However, currently Polack jokes aren’t used as much anymore.  Today, the Polish are well-educated, democratic leaders in Eastern Europe, and an ally.

Polack jokes are a popular form of Blazon Populaire, a type of humor which is based on the insulting another race of group of people.  This joke is clearly an example of blazon populaire, as it is a typical Polack joke that capitalizes on the belief that all Polish are unintelligent.  The best friend of the Polish man is a dog, and while dogs are traditionally a ‘man’s best friend’, they’re not supposed to be.  This represents that a standard Polish man does not have the capacity to make friends with other people, and that his time is best spent with an animal with a smaller brain and incapacity to communicate.  Also, the Polack must also believe that his wife would choose to have an affair with his dog, which is also dumb on the Polack’s part.

This joke works like many other jokes on the establishment of an appropriate incongruity in the punch line.  The incongruity is that the wife is sleeping with a dog, but it’s appropriate because it’s the Polack’s best friend.

Death Joke

When I die, I want to go peacefully, like my grandfather.
I do not want to be screaming in terror like the rest of the people in the car.

This death-humor joke, which my informant said he remembers from Saturday Night Live, is a fairly simple one to analyze structurally.  According to folklorist Elliot Oring, the source of humor in jokes is the presence of “appropriate incongruities.”  The joke introduces apparent incongruities – ideas that seem out of place, impossible, obscene, or otherwise wrong in some way – and the punchline delivers appropriateness or creates both appropriateness and incongruity at once.  However, this joke is unique in that it reverses the order of the appearance of appropriateness and incongruity.  Whereas traditionally the incongruity comes first and is justified by the punchline, here the first line (and part of the second) makes sense and the punchline reveals the sad incongruity – the old man fell asleep at the wheel.  If the situation is sad, though, then why is it funny?  Certainly a joke like this would not be funny for someone who has recently lost a loved one in a car accident.  However, humor is a popular outlet in many societies for dealing with the concept of death, particularly societies like America who do not share universal beliefs about death and the afterlife.

Knock-knock Joke – Amy Fisher

A. Knock Knock.
B. Who’s there?
A. Amy Fisher.
A. Amy Fishe…?
B. … BANG!
This was only a couple years after a girl named Amy Fisher went to the door of the house of a man named Joey Buttafuco, whom she was having an affair with. She asked him to leave his wife and when he refused she went to his house and shot his wife in the head. This can be an example of a kind of disaster joke, these are risky because for a certain time after the initial incident, people can find the joke inappropriate.