New Jersey Is No Joke! Why the Most Notorious Garden State Stereotypes Don’t Hold Up

It is, actually. Hundreds of them. And they’ve been collected into books. One, The New Jersey Joke Book, was published in the late 1990s. The book fills its 160 pages by trading on a series of hoary stereotypes, including the idea that New Jersey smells, that it’s devoid of culture and filled with troglodytes, that it’s a dense patch of traffic noise and rude drivers who don’t…