This guy, who speaks only Spanish, walks into a department store wishing to buy socks. The helpful sales person only speaks English. After showing the guy everything in the store, they finally come to a display of socks. The guy says Eso Si! Que es!
And the sales person says “Well! If you’d spelled it in the first place we could have saved a lot of time!”
And 1 funny story from my own experience:
I try speak Chinese with my daughters, and I and they know just a bit. When we adopted them from China, we kept their Chinese names as middle names. This particular daughter was about 4 when her mom was talking with someone about naming kids, and had the girls introduce themselves. Jett said her name, and mom says “what about your middle name”? Jett replies “Plane!” (Which we often call her, of course.) Mom says “no, I mean your Chinese middle name” (HongQing). Jett replies: “Feiqi!” (Which is “plane” in Chinese.)
There must be other dual-language jokes out there.
IIRC correctly, when Michel Gondry was filming “Eternal Sunshine” he was out to eat with some people. At one point after dinner, he said, “I needed to speak.” Someone said “Well why didn’t you say so?”
He was actually saying, with a French accent, “I need a toothpick.”
Well, there’s the one from grade school that ends with the Frenchman saying “Oui, oui!” and the taxi driver saying “Not in my cab you don’t.”
Extremely dated: The one about a solemn funeral procession in Mexico. Suddenly, the grief-stricken widow throws herself on the coffin, crying “¿Porque? ¿Porque?” At which point the coffin lid opens a few inches, and a voice from within says “Butter!”
This was funny in the '70s when there was a TV commercial for Parkay margarine showing the Parkay tub saying “Butter!”
A female American friend of mine went to Spain for a semester and went out one night to a club. Surrounded by guys she was speaking in broken Spanish and they in broken English. When the subject of food came up she wanted to say she liked jam, also called preserves. She didn’t know the Spanish for it so she said ‘preservativo’ which means condoms in Spanish…for a few minutes the men thought the topic of conversation had changed drastically.
My high school Spanish teacher told us a story about a church trip to Mexico that she took. One person on the trip spoke no Spanish and was taking a crash course from one of the locals at the church they were visiting. He was coming along slowly and was trying to tell his tutor how embarrassed he was that he couldn’t communicate.
He didn’t know the word for embarrassed so he took a stab and said, “Soy embarazada.” It means, “I’m pregnant.”
There’s a Russian joke, well-known to the point of cliche, that dates back to the 90s that has a New Russian who is in Europe and wants to travel to Ireland, using his limited English. He walks up to the counter at the airport and says “ту тикетс ту Даблин”[Two tickets to Dublin]. The ticket agent is also a Russian expat and answers back “Куда, блин?” [Kuda, blin? = Where to, goddammit?]. The New Russian replies “Туда, блин!” [Tuda, blin! = To there, goddamit!]
Bhí beirt den IRA ag siúl síos Bóthar na bhFál i mBéal Feirste. Chonaic siad fear eile chucu. Dúirt an chéad fhear
“An gceapann tu go bhfuil an fear sin ina bhall den UVF?”,
agus dúirt an dara fear
“Ní cheapaim.”
A direct translation is
Two IRA members are walking down the Falls Road in Belfast. They see another man walking against them. The first of the men says
“Do you think he’s a member of the UVF?”,
to which the other replies,
“I don’t think so.”
“Ní cheapaim” is the Irish for “I don’t think so”, but also sounds like “Knee-cap him”. Knee capping is a punishment notoriously used by paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland.
From Douglas Adams Last Chance to See, while in China looking for a rare blind river dolphin they, Mr. Adams and the BBC camera crew, want to waterproof a microphone to put it in the river to hear the river they way the dolphin does.
The way you do this is to buy a condom and slip that over the mic.
They go to a Chinese pharmacy and try to buy a condom through the language barrier. The pharmacy people keep trying to give them pills and explaining that ‘these work better’.
Some friends of mine, a married couple, go to Europe. While in Italy, the woman, unexpectedly, starts her period. Unlike Batman, she is not prepared. They go into a pharmacy and the desired product is not on the shelf. The stoy is related by the husband as he stands by the door and his wife is at the back counter talking to a man who doesn’t speak much english and she speaks almost no Italian. The man is bent over the counter as she is speaking very softly and making small hand gestures. Suddenly a huge smile comes over the man’s face and he loudly proclaims ‘OHHHHHHHh TAMPONIOOOOOO!’ He turns and yells to someone in the back. “HEY LUIGI! Tamponio!” From the back comes a slighlty quieter response “Regular or Suuuupper Maxi?” The woman is now dead from embarassment.
Dutch lady is asked what she does for a living by English friends:
Lady: ‘I fok horses’
English friends: ‘Pardon?’
Lady: ‘Yes, Paarden’
Translation: The verb ‘fokken’ means ‘to grow, to raise or to bread’. It is, of course, semantically related but not identical to English ‘to fuck’. Paarden, pronounced pretty much like pardon, means horses.
