Rabelais.

I'm reading Rabelais in bursts, and though so many of the jokes only probably work in French and are highly referential, I still love it.

Like, he has a chapter about why the walls of Paris should be built out of prostitutes' c*nts (answer: what else could better withstand pounding from soldiers' weapons?), and then he also has this joke that revolves around different ways to translate this particular verb form that you find in Hebrew.

The critical apparatus says to think of his work as having the high-and-low Carnival atmosphere of Mardi Gras, and I think that's right.

It's totally like the totally socially-accepted vulgar shit that you see coming out of parade floats in New Orleans, like how my one friend with the cat who now lives there was telling me about this one float she saw with Bobby Jindal, where he had his pants down around his ankles and was ass-fucking a pelican ( = the state bird and thus a symbol of Louisiana).