Stuff White People Like, Ill-Advised Jew Jokes, and Rules of Engagement

Make laughing at white people funny again

I'd pick up Julio and Sam every morning before work, two of my coworkers who were roommates and equally covered in DUIs and revoked licenses, so that they didn’t have to take the train and I could use the 3+ HOV lane on I-95. They'd been best friends for ages, both Gen-Xers in their late 40s. Sam would climb in the front, Julio in back, and they'd bicker back and forth for the 45 minutes or so that we were on the road, trading good-natured insults about being a “wop” or a “wetback” while I laughed. It was 2019 and no one was allowed to make jokes like that anymore in normal mixed company, so it was refreshingly fun to listen to.

Stuff White People Like

How To Subvert Stuff White People Like

I remember when casual “anti-”white jokes were hilarious, back in the days of websites like “Stuff White People Like” and its comedy and TV/film ilk. As a white person, it's fun to laugh at myself! As a person in general, it's fun to laugh at myself! I think that’s one of the primary reasons we like the comedy that we like: at least a part of it is that you relate to what the comedian is portraying, whether it’s a common human experience or unique to a group you belong to like men or women or Korean country singers in Iowa or being a gay Republican in Ottawa or whatever.

Lighthearted websites, comedy sets, sketches helped in other, more subtle ways, too: they served as an astute social reprimand disguised as a sincerely funny joke, causing many of the people who related to the behavior to become a little more self-aware and begin to catch themselves before acting on similar cringeworthy impulses in the future.

Nowadays, though, the white people jokes just don’t have the same ring to them. They’re less whimsical and lighthearted and more, well… angry. Like, they’re not even really jokes anymore, are they? It’s not a secret that we’re more polarized than ever both politically and racially, but to really tell where we’re at culturally, just look not at what we’re not allowed to laugh at, but the tenor of that laughter.

literally always delicious no matter what you want to call them

I remember when we used to poke fun at things like “Midwestern tack-ohs” and how white people didn’t season their food. It was funny because people, definitely including white people, can all think of at least one white person we know who fits this description to a T, and it was on the nose.

We don’t really laugh appreciatively at those things anymore — now we scream at each other in TikTok and Instagram Reel comment threads about whether or not washing chicken makes black people less gross than white people and whether or not Lawry’s is necessary to use on every vegetable one consumes in order to make it palatable. Jokes about white people aren’t something white people even want to laugh at these days because we know that the people who make them aren’t laughing with us anymore, but at us. What better to fan the flames of the culture and race and gender wars and help ensure a backlash reactionary political victory?

blame it on all my British DNA, but I’d eat tf out of all of this

What about teh menz?

While much of the humor was just kind of low-brow and dumb, there was plenty of friendly, banter-style jokes about how men are doofuses who need help navigating basic tasks like noticing what is directly in front of them. I mean, half of these are jokes men would make about themselves, in a humorously self-deprecating tone. These days, the jokes you see about men are more likely to be in the form of women drinking from mugs with graphic “men’s tears” script affixed to them, or men just apologizing for existing and forgetting to be funny altogether.

The inherent absurdity of “Jew jokes”

I was talking to my cousin a while ago about working with Zoomers and how different they are from us, the Elder Millennials who are rapidly leaving the zone of targeted demographics everyone cares about impressing. How we used to only work with fellow Millennials, but now these Zoomers have entered the workforce and they're teaching us things, by osmosis if not directly.

Cousin told me his Zoomer coworkers have adopted him and enjoy his “edgy” humor. He says they seem to like it and crave it more than their own peers are willing to provide for fear of, idk, cancelation, probably. Who isn't at this point?

I almost didn't send my reply, but then I thought, it's Cousin, he'll get your joke.

I told him, “I get it! I mourn the loss of being able to send pictures of my Wandering Jew¹ plant in my oven to my friends. Those were the days.”

Bouncing dots. Silence. More bouncing dots. More silence. Oh shit, he has no idea what to say. Don't cancel me, cuz, let me explain.

It was already a little crispy. I'm not very good at plants

Familiarity

I didn't grow up knowing many Jewish people. Just a few, and it was always so unremarkable to me in my childlike simplicity, like, “oh, so you get the Christmas with the hashed browns and the daily presents for a whole week and the candles and that top game, cool.” I didn't know anyone considered “Jewish” to be a race yet; they were just other white people with an older religion that didn’t seem that different from mine as I knew it at the time, and darker, usually curlier hair by which I was enthralled because it was the kind of hair I wished I had. Volume and curls seemed universally desirable and I thought dark hair was much more exotic, and it looked like my mom’s. I idolized the teacher in my elementary school who showed us her Star of David necklace and explained her religion to us because she was so pretty and I, with my pale, freckly skin and straight, boring light brown hair, wanted to look just like her.

We learned about the Holocaust, of course. Well, I don't actually remember learning about it; I just don't remember not knowing about it. I knew that there was something called “antisemitism” and that it was bad, and that, because it happened during WW2, it was also old. I couldn't understand why so many people had such a problem with people practicing a different religion than they did and starting a whole war over it with the intention of eliminating all of its practitioners. I also wondered why Jewish people didn’t just lie and say they weren’t Jewish back then. How would anyone know? You aren’t literally born with your religion, after all.

I couldn’t think of anything about their religion to hate, especially since I saw it as the “precursor” to my own family’s religion and those of most of the antisemites. It didn't make logical sense to me, so I blew it off as an old and stupid bigotry, one of many we'd conquered, thankfully all before I was born.

See, I was not terribly well-informed. Knowing people in the group you’re talking about is helpful for this reason, and like I said, I didn’t know a lot of Jewish people, and the context of the school lessons hadn't really sunk in yet. I was also young enough when it did that I didn’t grasp the nuances of culture versus religion vs ethnicity (frankly, I'm hardly sure I do now).

Remember when same-sex marriage wasn’t recognized everywhere in the US yet and studies came out showing that people who actually knew someone who was gay were much more likely to support gay marriage, while those who didn’t support it were less likely to know (that they knew) any gay people?

A plurality of people who changed their minds from opposed to same-sex marriage to in favor of it did so because they knew gay people.

Same thing, in a sense.

I’d seen the old cartoons with the exaggerated features and heard the jokes about being rich and miserly, and I'd even independently noticed that the bank goblins in Harry Potter seemed to contain all of the worst aesthetic stereotypes I'd heard about Jews from so long ago, but I didn't think much of it. It was all so transparently goofy and illogical, and obviously nobody believed that stuff anymore!

The thing was, I just didn’t have enough Jews around who would be able to tell me that those people actually did still exist, and as a result, I thought Jew jokes were simply an absurd genre of humor and therefore fucking hilarious the same way I can’t not lose my shit any time someone bonks their head on something. The absurdity of the jokes were too over the top. Comically giant noses? Evil grins? A ruthless quest for money and trickery at all costs? What nonsensical, outlandish hilarity. An irrevocable appreciation for the most tasteless Jew jokes on the planet might simply be the inevitable consequence of the combination of both a nearly Jew-less upbringing and the absurdity of the conspiracy theories and their presentations, themselves.

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Despite what some people have thought about me as a result of certain jokes I’ve made or a simple lack of basic comprehension on their part (2017 was a dangerous year to disagree with a left-wing Jewish person about literally anything in front of other people, at least on Facebook where I happened to make this very terrible mistake), it's not that I didn't, or don't, think there's anything wrong with “Nazis”; it's more like I feel like my disagreement and lack of support for their ideology is self-evident — at least, I feel like it should be self-evident to anyone who actually knows me. Even today, in the year of our Trump 2026, people who sincerely believe in advancing a neo-Nazi agenda are still a minority, and my position on the political left has been established for some time. For people who know me to disregard what they know about me to win a zero sum political game is frustrating at best, but I've since learned that those people either weren't really my friends to begin with, or they are the type to never keep close friends because they like purity tests more than companionship.

I'm not saying now's the time for normal, non-antisemites to embrace the Jew Joke, but I am saying that maybe we've gone a bit overboard on what we have decided is actually offensive and, I suspect, we've convinced ourselves of some pretty silly things to support that belief.

Evergreen

When did we get so goddamned sensitive about everything?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and reiterate what I’ve said a number of times (and what many others have said, as well, explicitly or otherwise) around these parts: we stopped being able to laugh at ourselves once Occupy Wall Street was effectively dismantled by those seeking to undermine class solidarity.

I have to agree with ashley ray here in her very old note that demonstrates how long ago I started writing this somewhat disjointed essay. This kind of humor — where we laugh at ourselves, especially white lefties of all stripes — was good. It was funny, it was self-deprecating, and it was self-aware. And it feels like it couldn’t be made today with the same flavor of humor, much like Strangers with Candy, as Cinema Timshel describes:

I guess what’s most startling about this show, even though it wasn’t particularly popular when it aired, is that it seems to come from an American culture that wasn’t afraid to make fun of itself relentlessly, and to poke fun in provocative, intelligent ways at ordinary life, drugs, sex, sexual harassment, racism, and especially authority figures. Every authority figure in the show is hypocritical and corrupt, but we get to laugh at them and have fun with it. It’s miles away from the spate of prestige TV shows where the point seems almost to revel in the downbeat misery of the degree to which people can be so corrupt.

(emphasis mine)

Make jokes about white people funny again. Make laughing at ourselves something we can actually do again. Let offensive things be funny again! We'll all be okay. And maybe a little less sincerely hateful for it.

(I can't remember why I thought the crispy Wandering Jew plant joke belonged here in this essay, but like I said, I started writing it like a year ago and I felt like my terrible joke needed to be immortalized somehow)

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1. Wandering Dude? Whatever we're calling it now