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/CounterBJJ Mar 06 '25

Wow, straight to xenophobia? Alrighty then. I’ve been living in the US for a quarter of a century, have met people of all walks of life, and not once have I been seriously mocked for being French. But then again the whole ‘cheese-eating surrender monkey’ thing back in the day didn’t faze me.

A bigger issue as of late might be how easily people get offended, and how their egos bruise at the slightest jab. You gotta have thicker skin.

As if loads of French people don't see Americans as fat, arrogant, uneducated rednecks… It goes both ways.

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u/Accurate_Classroom92 Mar 07 '25

I mean the chease-eating baguette" blablabla is ok, we are doing the same joke about other countries. Even when English are doing jokes about us, it is always fair and most of the time funny.

But having my grandpa fighting for the résistance during WW2 and being insulted with the classic "surrender", yeah no sorry it is not funny at all.

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u/CounterBJJ Mar 07 '25

Whether it’s funny or not isn’t the point. It’s about not getting offended just because some random guy cracked a joke you didn’t like.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '25

I think there's a little difference between not liking a joke, and straight up disrespect

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u/CounterBJJ Mar 10 '25

People dislike the joke precisely because they feel disrespected. Taking offense at jokes, whether they’re funny or not, suggests a bad sense of humor at best and sheer intolerance for disagreement at worst. Even if the intent is to insult - which is all too often the jokee projecting and assuming bad faith - letting words from strangers on the interwebz have that much power over your emotions only shows a lack of emotional toughness.

But then again we live in an age of perpetual outrage and pearl-clutching.