When I seven or eight years old, Amos ‘n’ Andy was one of my favorite TV shows. The Kingfish’s devious plots were funny enough, but the highlights were Andy’s desperate, “Who ya gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?” fabrications when Sapphire had caught him in some misdeed. (It seems to me a terrible waste that no one has had the skill or courage to develop a series less laden with racial stereotypes to make use of the vast resources of comic African-American folklore.)
What makes me think of that is a story in today’s New York Times, which makes it appear that Andy has changed his name to Cohen and gone into the fish business.
The Times bought fish labelled “wild salmon” at eight retail outlets in New York and sent it off to a lab to be tested. Of the eight samples, six were farm-raised, and one appeared to be a farm-raised fish that had escaped into the wild.
Naturally, the reporter went back to the stores to collect the lies the fishmongers would tell. The best, the truly Andy-quality lie, came from one Phil Cohen, the store manager of M. Slavin & Sons in Brooklyn:
All wild salmon in Canada is farm raised.
All right, then.