GREENPOINT — Tova Raykin was strolling on her street one recent evening when she couldn't help but giggle at a graffiti-covered sign on a Greenpoint Avenue chicken slaughterhouse.
The sign for longtime chicken factory Lee's Live Poultry Slaughter had been papered over to read "Live Poultry Laughter", and an egg yolk-yellow colored spray of graffiti added the words "Comedy Club" underneath.
"It'd be the perfect place to have a comedy club," Raykin said of the wordplay. "It's hilarious."
But inside the warehouse between Manhattan Avenue and Franklin Street, which is actually a slaughterhouse for chickens, employees were hardly amused.
Grim-faced workers pulled bags of freshly killed birds out of the factory and piled them inside a van Friday, ignoring a reporter's questions except to say that the owner was not around to comment.
Still, to a neighborhood jaded by graffiti, the sign attracted a round of mixed reviews.
A young woman passing by said she noticed the missing "s" in slaughter back in the spring.
"I pointed it out to my classmate because I thought it was just ironic," said Amanda, 20, who declined to give her last name. "The comedy club sign just went up one or two weeks ago."
But not all neighbors found the guerilla name change so amusing, like Brian Hershberger, who noticed the sign for the first time Friday.
"I don't think it's funny, it seems cynical," Hershberger, 22, said.
"I don't think it's in good taste, because it's laughing at victims before they die."
