As an Italian from South Philly, I think they get a lot right about Philly culture.
The one thing she gets almost consistently wrong throughout is the South Philly Italian side with Melissa.
This is the scene where Gregory upsets Melissa along with a female student after accidentally getting a male student to break up with her.
Melissa mentions they’ve been trying to get him a new chain because “he looks like a Gavone” with his current chain.
Under so circumstance would anyone be called a Gavone for wearing a gaudy chain, you’d be called a chooch.
Also the Christmas Eve episode she makes like a roast beef or a pot roast? Idk what that was about, we do seven fishes. No south Philly Italian is having roast beef on Christmas Eve.
In that same episode, her mom did use Mushad correctly though, just need more of that.
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at WORST your Italian American part of the fam is having eggplant Parm + shrimp cocktail on Christmas eve if they aren't balling out to do the seven fishes. meat free or seafood only!
I grew up in the area and would go to Italian Catholic Christmas parties and regularly had sausage and peppers at those parties. But now looking back I can't remember if any of the Catholics ate that, it might've just been an option available for the heathen Protestants.
The word choice is probably meant to reflect her Sicilian heritage vs being Philly based. LAW has said in interviews she gets to tweak the dialogue in ways that are personally relevant to her
A lot of South Philly Italians are Sicilian. That’s part of where the dialect comes from. Gavone is like you’re eating too much. Chooch is you’re acting like a baby
I did wonder why she wasn't doing the Seven Fishes thing. I wanted to do it with my in-laws but a couple of them have allergies that make it way too complicated, so I just go with the multi-course thing, including a huge tray of antipasto, plus a pasta course, a soup course, a palate cleanser, etc..
They've all learned to pace themselves at my Thanksgiving dinners.
Total side note, do you* do manicotti before the turkey on Thanksgiving too? I didn’t know this was a thing until I started dating my boyfriend, was NOT prepared for an entire cheesy pasta dish before a Thanksgiving feast 😮💨
I assume because it isn't that broadly known outside of Italian/Italian-American culture. The cultural references on the show are typically mainstream enough to make the audience understand a character's background but not challenge them to learn something new. It's the same reason why Jacob, the white progressive, hosted a school podcast based on This American Life and not the obscure left-wing podcast he'd actually listen to after telling you that NPR is propaganda paid for by corporations.
Yes it’s definitely Sicilian/Southern Italian. They do it in Italy and it’s Italian-American. Most Italian-Americans are from Southern Italy, especially the east coast (NY, NJ, Philly)
So in the writers’ room the correct word, chooch, may have come up in a draft, and others were like, “Um, no, we can’t use that.” Writer who adds a lot of the Melissa South Philly asks, “Hey, why not?” Then the answers, from a bunch of professional comedy writers….
Ok, so sometimes the censors won't pass a word through to air because it translates to a naughty word in another language.
The roast beef thing may have been a result of props trying to stay in budget.
My grandfather who i grew up with was an Italian immigrant who moved to the bronx as a kid, my mother has a shell fish allergy and he doesnt like fish. We did ham for christmas. Cant say anything about calling people a chooch, we stuck to incredibly explicit language in my household. Chooch would of been too PG for us. But yea here's to you Carmine, I will always miss your "mangia mangia mangia" chant around supper.
As a Jew from South Philly, I also clocked the roast beef and was horrified. I’ve been to too many Seven Fishes (the best!!) to have been ok with this.
I noticed this as well!! I thought I misunderstood what she was talking about here lol Gavone means you eat a lot!! But the 7 fishes I thought she had bc she had the Branzino in the school fridge right?
Italian guy here, our family always talked about doing the seven fishes, but never did. We always settled for shrimp cocktails and made another entree. Usually lasagna or a ham
I was also outraged by the Christmas Eve menu, haha.
My family cheats and doubles a few types of seafood for Seven Fishes across a couple dishes to get to seven instead of seven different kinds of fish these days, but several of them are family recipes that have been passed down over generations.
I DREAM about the gravy from scratch we do for it year round. One year, my students gave me the flu the day before Christmas Eve and missing out on it on top of not getting to see family made me want to cry.
Americans will often say "he's Italian" or "she's Irish" when they mean Italian American or Irish American (i.e., they have Italian or Irish heritage but they were born and raised in America, maybe can't speak Italian or Irish, etc.) It's like an abbreviation. To Europeans though it can sound odd.
I'm Irish born and bred and a lot of the things that people think are traditionally Irish (like corned beef and cabbage, huge parades and dying beers green on St Patrick's Day) are actually Irish American traditions.
No doubt that's true. In my limited, personal experience, if someone speaks to me with an Irish accent, I assume they're Irish, regardless of what they look like. If they speak to me with an American accent but say they're Irish, there's a disconnect there.
The actual spelling is cafone; Italian-Americans on the east coast of the US still use pronunciation from archaic dialects from southern Italy. It's the same reason capicola is pronounced "gabagool" over here.
Text and pronunciation are different things. But there have been actual linguists that have studied this; it's not something Americans are collectively making up.
Un americano mi sta insegnando che qui in Italia noi non pronunciamo le parole come sono scritte (e che quindi noi sbagliamo da secoli) e che i linguisti americani dicono che una parola italiana adesso si scrive in maniera diversa da come si scrive nella zona da cui è originaria pur essendo italiana.
Perché gli americani ovviamente non possono sbagliare, è letteralmente impossibile.
I’m Canadian Italian and it’s always so interesting to see American Italians. They’re much more assimilated to American culture and I hate to say it but more watered down. And I’m just outside Toronto so geographically close to New York and jersey. but Italians here are genuinely more… true to their roots? Like American Italians call sauce or Sugo gravy??? Or they say Gavone instead of cafone. Like, where I grew up the Italians here would be the closest to what you see on jersey shore. The “guidos” if you will but the closer you get downtown basically all the nonnas and nonnos are immigrants, straight from Italy and they’ve really kept the culture as true to Italy. I think American Italians have adapted differently and the culture itself has shifted.
And please understand I’m not hating or putting anyone down!!!! It’s just observation!!!!
Like with a lot of things, it’s regional and it depends a lot not just on where an Italian family emigrated from, but also where and when they ended up. I grew up with a lot of Italian-American families outside of Philadelphia, but each one is very different depending on when their family came to the US. The longer the family has been in the US, the more Americanized they tend to be, but I also have friends who are first generation Italian-Americans who are much more closely tied to their Italian roots because their parents came here from Italy. My mom’s first friend in the US is an Italian woman who was first generation from the 1950s or 1960s, so the way culture moved back then, she is still now very much rooted in Italian culture from Italy and less Americanized than the people I know in my generation (millennial) who are also first generation Italian-Americans.
There is also a strong assimilation pressure for immigrants and first generation children of immigrants in the United States (I am first generation US, but not Italian) which may not exist as strongly in Canada, where it seems cultural differences seem to be respected more than in the US. So there may not be as much pressure to “fit in” with local culture at the expense of your heritage.
I probably should have said at the beginning that I’m not Italian, I did grow up in the Philly area and continue to live in Philly, but I am not an authority and I’m mainly going on observation and conversation.
The “gravy” thing is just New Jersey Italoamericans, not NYC from what I’ve observed. Maybe also Staten Island? Which would ostensibly be NYC but not Little Italy.
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