Comment The anti-French jokes are on you (Score 4, Insightful) 699
The Anti-French sentiment stems from lingering inadequacy on the part of the Americans. France did not give the US the Statue of Liberty just because they thought the US was a bunch of really nice guys.
The American Revolution was a proxy war, by France against Britain. It was very similar in many respects to the Soviet-Afghan War, where the United States funneled arms and billions of dollars to the Afghanis. The French involvement in the American war was of a vastly greater scale.
The French supplied almost all of the gunpowder used through at least the first half of the war, almost all the cannon used throughout the war, tens of thousands of muskets, an army about the size of the Continental Army, military advisors, and vast amounts of money. In total they spent about a billion livres and increased their national debt by a third. The ante-climactic battle of the war involved a massive fleet engagement of French and British vessels and forced Gen. Cornwallis' surrender to the American forces. The Americans had no naval force worth mentioning (the description of a sixth-rate frigate as being "rough equivalent of half of a 64-gun ship of the line" is hilarious), and it is difficult to overstate either the power of a massed group of warships or their impact on warfare. Considered from an objective perspective, the American Revolution was an important but not decisive campaign in what should be known as the Second Hundred Years' War.
Why did Americans turn against the French after the war? It's simple: they wanted to promote their own heroes, and the idea that they had won the war all by themselves. It's really embarrassing to have to teach your children that your country wouldn't exist except that it happened to be a bone of contention in someone else's scheme. Similarly, I spent quite a bit of time down in Panama this last year, and I met very few people who had any idea of the US involvement in the creation of that country. They make anti-gringo jokes pretty often too, and they're funny for the same reason that anti-French jokes are in the US, but in both cases the joke is on the one telling it.