Which reminds me of a joke,* told around here in my father’s youth. I’ll paraphrase:
Q: Why did the little yat** put the TV on the radiator?Get it? Boil/Berle? (Oil/erl.) Get it? Ha ha ha ha ha ha… ugh.
A: To watch Milton Berle.
* Apparently, laughing in the face of calamity is an essential life skill down here. One can’t help but feeling mad, sick, and sad—they’re inevitable and appropriate responses—but an unrelenting diet of anger, nausea, and sorrow makes it mighty hard to get out of bed in the morning. Folks would have given up on this godforsaken city and this tenuous slice of less-than-land a long time ago (Yellow Jack, hurricanes, poverty, floods, pestilence, heat, crime, corruption... and cataclysmic environmental disasters) if they couldn’t take or make a joke, however dark (or, er, frivolously tangential and corny).
** Yeah, this one requires some contextual cultural knowledge. If you don’t know what dat “yat” is, den read dat link.
Once again I guess we have proved that erl and water do not mix!
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