P.S.: Kal och Ada
Today's göteborgsvits already starred Kal and Ada, so it got a P.S. of its own — one default card in göteborgska, one in English via the East End version.
Göteborgs-Posten has been running Sture Hegerfors's daily single-panel strip P.S. since 1972 — a Gothenburg institution, syndicated to this day. The name is apt for a joke column: the whole form is a postscript, a last-minute aside after everything else has already been said.
Göteborgsvitsar — the city's own joke tradition — work the same way. There's no real setup, just two people who are already mid-conversation, usually Kal and Ada, usually complaining about something minor in the thickest göteborgska imaginable. ISOF, the Institute for Language and Folklore, lists Kal, Kålle, Ada, Osbon and Beda as the names that keep turning up in older göteborgsvitsar — so when today's joke from got-vits, the little service that generates one of these per day, happened to land on exactly that pair, it felt like the right excuse for a P.S. of its own.
Standard — Göteborg, in göteborgska
Kal and Ada, SKF, and a punchline that only works if you can hear the dialect in your head while you read it.
In English — the East End version
got-vits also runs the same joke genre through the "Little London" angle — Gothenburg's old 19th-century nickname from its Scottish and English trading ties — and writes it as a working-class London joke, Alf and Stan standing in for Kal and Ada, no phonetic Cockney spelling, just the sentence shape and the deadpan.
Both cards are pulled live from got-vits, which caches one joke per city per day so everyone sees the same punchline until midnight, Europe/Stockholm. P.S. — Sture Hegerfors is still drawing his, more than fifty years on.
