Folded red ribbon fills a white-bread sandwich on an olive-green plate.

Original artwork, not a still

Milton Berle

Anytime a person goes into a delicatessen and orders a pastrami on white bread, somewhere a Jew dies.

Behind the line

What it means

Our interpretation.

This is a deli joke played as a dramatic curse. The speaker pretends that choosing a certain sandwich bread is so wrong that it causes a death somewhere in a community. It's dark, exaggerated humour about food tradition, built on absurd cause and effect.

Context reviewed

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