If you’ve seen Mare of Easttown you’ll get a hoot out of this. Especially if you’re from Pennsylvania and caught all the bits they make fun of in the SNL skit. And especially if you lived right next to the actual postage stamp township of Easttown which is nothing like the place on the TV show. The real Easttown is out toward the end of Philadelphia’s mainline, the place on the show is clearly meant to be in central PA, which is pretty much everything outside of the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh metro areas, or as James Carville refers to it, “Alabama”.
I had no idea what, if anything, that was a parody of, except awful accents. They do actually sound like a Philly native I worked with, except for the “durder” part. ISTR she pronounced it more like “dawwwter”. Obnoxious AF either way. Is “durder” the way some pronounce it?
I live in the area that the show takes place (there is a scene that was filmed in my town), but I am not a native. I do not believe that “daughter” is pronounced “durdur” in this area. The one that is stereotypical is pronouncing “water” like “wooder.” To be fair, any natives from the area that I associate with are mostly college educated, so a lot of the accent tends to get softened.
My wife and I have been watching Mare of Easttown, so we did find the SNL sketch amusing. Yeah, they took a bit of creative license to rhyme “murder” and “durder” but it was funny when the character played by (I think) Beck Bennet drops to his knees and yells “they murdered my durder!” (not that I find murder funny, but it’s a parody of a fiction, so…yeah).
as @mcgato says, “water” is more like “wooder” and they have Kate Winslet’s character say “wooder” like 10 minutes into episode 1, as if to establish, yeah, that’s right, this is a genuine Philly accent.
I don’t think any particular PA accent is being made fun of there, there are a lot of them and they converge and cross in odd ways. I do know people who sound kind of like that, but nobody exactly. And I think that was the point of the SNL skit, that the accent is overdone, whatever it was supposed to be.
This sketch puzzled me, too. I worked in Philly for the last 3 years, and I never heard anyone talk even remotely like that. Reminded me of the old Joe Piscopo “New Joisey” bit----I’ve lived all my life in New Jersey and have never once heard anyone here pronounce it like that, not even close.
Makes me wonder now how they actually pronounce “daughter” on the show. I’ll have to pay closer attention. Since water is pronounced “wooder” is daughter “dooder”? I know words that rhyme in one accent don’t necessarily in another though.
I also noticed in Mare of Easttown they stretch out their hard ‘o’s and add an extra vowel sound, almost like an Aussie accent. “Home” becomes “hayome”. “I’m gonna drink some wooder and go hayome”.
Until now, my entire education of dialects around Scranton came from watching every episode of The Office. My conclusion is that they all speak like Californians.
I found it to be a stupid sketch, I’ve lived in the general area for 22 years (not a native) and NO ONE talks even close to that sketch.
However it did pique my interest in watching the actual show, which I’ve enjoyed immensely. The only actor who’s accent feels a bit “off” is Winslet’s. She does this exaggerated, Australian-like “O” sound, that nobody does around here either.
