Did this happen in St Olaf?
This was back when my mother was alive and living with me. She was watching tv, and I was working upstairs. Suddenly she yelled up to me to come down, because “Carter’s grandmother is on tv.” I yelled “What?” and she repeated herself. So I yelled “Don’t you mean Carter’s mother?” remembering that Jimmy Carter’s mother lived with them in the White House, but surely after all these years she can’t possibly still be alive. So of course my mother repeated her claim that Carter’s grandmother was on tv. So I said that surely it was an old film, and she said, no, she’s live.
So I finally went downstairs, to see an elderly woman on tv. No, it wasn’t Jimmy Carter’s mother, it was the actress who played Dr. John Carter’s grandmother on ER.
I was working in an administrative office at a movie studio. A few of use were gathered around the cube of one of my staff. The staff person was looking over a script. This was not in his normal administrative job duties.
So, one of the others asked, “Is that a script? Why are you looking at a script?”
He replied, “Oh, I’m looking for a ferry.” (Now, it is important to note at this point that the person looking at the script is gay.)
The other who originally asked looked very perplexed, and in a hesitant voice asked, “Are you…looking for a…part…for…yourself?”
“Um, no…a boat.”
I used to play in a community band. We were asked to play the national anthem to kick off an event at a local bar. The bar had a stage, and there were chairs set up for us. As we were getting settled, one of the organizers came over and asked some of us to move over a bit because “There’s gonna be a colored guy over here.”
As I was wondering just what the hell I had gotten involved with, the uniformed, four-man color guard stepped up to do their thing.
Many years ago, my family was having lunch at Cheers (or the Bull and Finch, don’t remember what was on the building then.). My 3yo son decided to ask my wife for a fork. He did it at that one moment when there was a lull in everyone’s conversation, so the entire restaurant heard him exclaim “Fuck, momma!” Everyone turned to look, as my wife said very loudly, “Here’s your FORK, baby.”
One of my kids, then about 7, hand-wrote a friendly sign meant to say “Bon Apetit!” and posted it on our fridge. Except, being about 7, she didn’t know much about French and spelled it how she thought it sounded.
We left it there. For the next year or so, visitors were startled to see, in a child’s handwriting, a notice on our fridge that said “BONE UP A TEAT.”
My wife had been sick for a few days and did not go to work. Her boss’s name is David. She and I were talking about her returning to work the next day when my 3 year old daughter said:
“David is prolly wonderin where the Hell is Kathey.” Was not a mishearing.
So proud she used it in the right context, but had to have a talk about some words you should not say until you are older.
My mom is Vietnamese. (I was born there too, but came to the US as a baby.) She and I learned to speak English more or less at the same time, and when I was small, she had quite an accent.
Right around the time of my seventh birthday, she told me she didn’t want to let me go trick-or-treating that Halloween because, in her words, “There are widows that putting poison in the candy.” (This was 1980, when poisoned Halloween candy was making the news rounds.)
At age 7, I certainly knew what a widow was. I protested that they might be sad because their husbands were dead, but that didn’t mean they would automatically be poisoning trick-or-treaters. She insisted, “No, I read in the newspaper and I see on TV! This year there are widows that putting poison in the candy!”
It took us probably five full minutes of back-and-forth, and her saying that 30 times, before I realized she was trying to say weirdos.
Once again, forgive a not exact adherence to the thread title. This is another dual-meaning bit. I wouldn’t say that hilarity ensued at the time it happened, but it’s amusing in retrospect.
I was in a black literature course in college, one of several I took. The class was rather large and had both black and white students in it. (The professor, as I recall, was Greek!)
We were discussing a poem in which a woman was standing at a window and rather sadly peering out of it. In the context of the poem, it was unclear as to whether this was an actual flesh-and-blood woman or just an apparition of some sort.
So this was the issue that was being debated by the class. Opinions fell on both sides. One mousy little white girl, who was known to have come from a rather posh suburb, was arguing the case that it was an apparition.
She was encountering some disagreement with her position from others. In attempting to soften her stance a bit, she said “Well I don’t mean that she’s a spook or anything.”
There was an immediate outburst of hostile mumbling from the black students, the girl burst into tears, and the professor had to take some pains to restore order.
I was at a business luncheon and mentioned that I was quite hungry. Not being a fan of Jerk Chicken the young lady with a nice figure sitting next to me, turned, holding her plate up close to her breast said, “Would you like my chicken breast?”
It was noisy and I could have sworn she said, “Would you like to tickle my breast?”
I froze! I blushed. I looked blankly at her.
She then quite loudly said, “What the hell did you think I just said?”
No turning back now. I replied, “No, I would not like to tickle your breast in front of all these people.”
A freindship was born.
Manny’s hearing problem always makes me laugh.
Which is an odd coincidence, because my daughter (see above) insisted for a year or so that the venomous spider you should stay away from was called a “black weirdo”.
I can completely see it. We guys, we just tend to hear what we want to hear. 
Ah, the infamous T-mobile christmas elf orgy party commercial. You ain’t the only one that heard it that way.
Hahaha! 
Now I regret turning down my swinger friend’s invitation to a 4G party. :smack:
My favourite – and sorry, this is a second hand story.
A young couple had enrolled their toddler son in a day care facility. After he had been attending there for some months they were called in to talk with the staff who had some very serious concerns about their son and in particular the language he had been using. It seems that he had been chasing a young girl and calling her two names – one beginning with F and the other with C. The parents were mortified and could not imagine where their son could have ever been exposed to such language.
It turned out after some investigation that the young boy had a tendency to truncate some of his words. And also incidentally he was attempting to emulate an English accent. The poor kid was trying to play Thomas the Tank Engine and wanted someone to be the Fat Controller.
Well, okay, since this thread has bubbled up again (I missed it the first time around somehow), I’ll mention one that I heard on the radio many times, some years ago.
Back in the days when I lived on that planet Earth that most of you call home, I listened to news radio a lot, and the sports reports often mentioned a certain tennis player, Andy Roddick.
I never followed sports, and I was not familiar with the name. As I heard it on the radio, I always mis-heard it as <something-vague> Erotic. I felt reasonably sure that couldn’t be right, but I didn’t know for a long time what the name really was.
Come to think of it, a name with Rod Dick in it is kind of e-rod-dick, isn’t it?
At Caltech (and I understand, at a lot of schools that specialize in science and engineering), all of our sports teams were called “The Beavers”, because (of course) Beavers are ‘Nature’s Engineers’.
Not really “epic,” but still funny.
A friend was visiting me on an evening we were expecting an ice storm. We didn’t know when the storm was supposed to be coming in, so she called our local “Time and Temperature” number for an update on the weather. (This was before smart phones. ;))
She listened momentarily, and with widened eyes said, “I have to go right now!! They said the roads would be slick as snot!” :eek: I just couldn’t believe that was what was said, so we called again. I had to translate, because as it turned out, the roads would be slick in spots.