{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3524",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 3524,
    "subject": "PEACE: Sherry's immigrant joke",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2002-10-29T01:36:37+00:00",
    "last": "2002-10-29T01:36:37+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0210-1974@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi",
        "address": "mantis at siriusfiction.com"
      },
      "date": "2002-10-29T01:36:37+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) PEACE: Sherry's immigrant joke",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Sherry tells Weer that joke about the immigrant who writes back to his\ncousin about how on the first day in the new country a person eats free in\nthe best restaurant, sleeps in the most luxurious hotel, and gets a hatful\nof money and jewels.\n\nThe cousin writes back and says \"This happened to you?\"\n\nAnd the first guy says, \"Not to me, no; but to my _sister_.\"\n\nAt the first glancing and most innocent level, this joke has the form of\nurban legends -- i.e., the wonderful is always a step removed yet still at\nsome believable relation (\"it didn't happen to me but to a friend of my\nfriend\").\n\nThe more realistic level of the joke is that the sister has prostituted\nherself (a native has wined, dined, bedded, and paid her) and the\nimmigrants are too naive to understand such prostitution, for any variety\nof reasons (for example, they always got the same in the old country and\nwere still treated like dirt).\n\nThis is a curious joke to come from a girl who has just prostituted herself\nfor purposes of blackmail!\n\nBut it also matches well with what we know about Doris: as a pretty yet\nmundane girl in the carny world, her roles are limited to using her body\nfor titilation or outright prostitution, and she is treated like dirt.  But\nif she were a freak, she would be an aristocrat among the carnies.\n\nI make this parallel not to link Sherry and Doris as being the same person,\nor even related, but being both young women feeling pressure to prostitute\nthemselves.\n\n=mantis="
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}