The Butt Of The Joke

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 12 seconds

Recently me and a friend of mine that I work with were discussing his home state of North Dakota. How cold does it get there? What do people from North Dakota do for fun? Why would anyone possibly have reason to visit North Dakota?

The conversation then gravitated toward who North Dakota's interstate rivals are and the states North Dakota looks down upon.

Namely, if a North Dakotan is telling a joke and needs a dumb character to jump out of an airplane without a parachute, screw in a light bulb in a haphazard fashion or outfit a submarine with insufficient windows, which state will this person reside?

The obvious answer to me would be South Dakota. I figured both Dakotas would claim to be the better Dakota, the real Dakota.

Rather, he said, the accepted states to utilize are Minnesota and Montana. (My first thought was what could be funny about Montana? Ranch hands? Mountaineers? Are there any glacier jokes floating around out there? A Google search produced this gem: Why is North Dakota so windy? Because Minnesota sucks and Montana blows.)

How North Dakotans feel toward Minnesota and Montana reinforces the notion that who the butt of the joke is changes by when and where you live and doesn't always make the most sense.

I was discussing this concept a few years ago with two friends of mine, one from Mexico, the other from Bolivia (An American, a Mexican and a Bolivian walk into a bar . . .). They said that when they need someone to be the butt of the joke, they use people from a place in Spain called Galicia. To me Galicia is a place I'd never heard of but presume is on a map. To them, it's where all the dumb people from jokes live. Who knew?

When I was in my golden joke-telling years (grade school, 1983-1989), the butt of the joke was always a Polack. Always. Sometimes the adjective "dumb" was added, just in case there was any confusion as this particular Polack's intelligence. As in, Did you hear about the dumb Polack that froze to death outside a theater? He was waiting to see the movie "Closed for the Winter." Ka-Blam! Whew that one was funny the first time I heard it.

Why a Polack? I have no idea. Probably something involving World War II. But to this day, I still see Polish people in a light that should probably be a tad brighter than it is.

Around this same time, a slew of Ethiopian jokes began to spring up, thanks to a historical famine in the African country from 1983-85. If there's one thing that makes for great laughs, it's famine. These jokes mainly had to do with hunger, starvation and the hilarity of being dangerously skinny.

Like this choice joke, which I might add, I learned from my brother in 3^rd grade: How many Ethiopians can you fit into a bathtub? None. They all slide down the drain.

Horrible, I know. And probably too soon.

Why other famished African nations never got the same treatment, I don't know. I'm still waiting to hear a Kenya joke or something that skewers those rascally Algerians.

But then something funny (not ha-ha) began to happen. Not only were Ethiopians targeted for famine-related humor, suddenly they got caught up being the dumb person in the joke. Take one joke for instance, also told to me in elementary school, likely at recess. The premise is three people walking through the dessert. Each has one item that will either keep them cool or nourish them in some fashion. The first guy has water, the second guy has food. And the third guy has a car door so that when it gets hot, he can roll the window down.

When that joke was told to me, the guy with the car door was an Ethiopian! That's not necessary!

I was also told a joke that consisted of people going down a skunk hole to see how long they could stand the smell. One by one they would go down the hole, each staying longer and longer before the smell forces them out. Well, when it was the butt of the joke's turn to go down the skunk hole, they waited and waited before the skunk finally came out complaining of the awful odor.

What type of person would smell so bad that even a skunk would abandon its home to flee the terrible stench? According to this joke in the form in which is was told to me, an Ethiopian.

So because of mass famine, Ethiopians wind up being made fun of for being skinny and ravenously hungry, which progressed into being made fun of for being dumb, which ballooned into flat-out, mean-spirited contempt.

Most of the time, the butt of the dumb joke is understandable. Not justified, but understandable, formulated from a regional rivalry, xenophobia or long-standing stereotype. Hippies, aggies, jocks, blondes, Polacks, Montanans.

But Ethiopians? They were starving, skinny and malnourished. And according to our jokes in the mid-80s, they were dumb too.