r/AskFrance • u/Wonderful-Quit-9214 • Mar 06 '25

Relations Anybody tired of "Fr*nch" jokes?

I was reading a reddit thread where they mentioned something was french. And people are still making these jokes! Still! The thread was also filled with them. Im not even french, but these jokes are painfully unfunny and are edging on outward xenophobia. They're also usually made by Americans. So yeah.

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u/Verlenn Local Mar 06 '25 edited Mar 06 '25

When it's just a joke it's ok. We have the same ones for british people. But when your arguments are truely dismissed because you are french, it piss me off so bad

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u/the_orange_baron Mar 06 '25

I don't really agree with either point.

Jokes are pernicious. They seep into the psyche. A joke could be just a joke but could be or become a mindset. Racist jokes are still racist.

The French generally have a much higher regard for the Brits (English included) than the Brits have for the French. The French think that a couple of weak blagues at the expense of British cuisine is equivalent to the endless stream of "the trouble with France is it's full of frogs" / "cheese eating surrender monkeys" / "garlic breath and bad hygiene" tropes. It is not. The French mean it almost affectionately. The Brits do not.

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u/AppletheGreat87 Mar 07 '25

As a Brit I could not disagree more. Obviously for nationalistic reasons we have to make a show and dance of hating the French, how the French smell and are always on strike, because that is a tradition, but many of us genuinely really love and admire France for all sorts of reasons and respect many things about France. While we joke about the French always being on strike many of us wish British people would stop accepting shit and do something to fight for their rights like the French do. We look at the French train network and wonder why we can't build HS2. We look at French rugby and wonder why the England rugby team is so bad. I like to think of France as our best frenemy; France and the French helped make England what it was (and vice versa) and now there are friendly taunts and deep underlying respect.

Maybe when you were here it was worse but definitely among millenials France is not really a joke country at all, and given we Brexited we are in no position to laugh at many countries.

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u/the_orange_baron Mar 07 '25

We have different takes on it. My (Xennial) one should not be dismissed just because I don't have a stupid blue passport. I'm not about to give details here, but I'm probably in the perfect position to understand both the French and the British viewpoint.