Yes, I vaguely remember thinking that I was being polite when I laughed at his Polack and/or Clinton and/or other jokes. Is not that the proper social behavior solicited when one is regaled by a collection of these various verbal jokester compositions allegedly of a humorous nature? In most circles, the proper socially acceptable response to whatever the comedian says would be: "Ha! Ha! Ha!" Funny matters not. In the back of the mind, one certainly may harbor the notion that some jokesters ought to be more self-censoring. But in the moment of social interaction, one often does not have the luxury of throwing temper tantrums and showing other displays of anti-social behavior that might permanently ruin the relationships that one is towing or tolerating on another level. Besides which, there is another growing belief that these Pollacks may not be such amiable buffoons as they may pretend to be, perhaps to disarm their listeners before coming back later to berate us for laughing at their own jokes that they were telling us in the first place.
Which reminds me that often in El Salvador persons would tell us their Molina jokes, Molina being the president of that country at that time, and you could simply insert some other politicians' name into that and the effect would be the same, and how are we supposed to respond to that? Often their sense of humor is much lower and cruder than ours, but it would not seem appropriate to lecture on that point in response to every occasion, like some other prickly porcupines whose political interests are all about defending Molina. And their point also has merits. But we are supposed to remain impartial observers in the local politics and not involve ourselves in matters that are out of our control.
