Japanese Ads - Learn Japanese through advertisements

Japanese Jokes

「いろんな情報がいっパイン！」
「もう見てくレッタスか？」

If you haven’t had enough, check the white text in the lower left…

「ご利用果＆菜！」

This poster is full of bad… awful… rotten… terrible… Japanese jokes. Understand them. Analyze their structure. Make worse jokes of your own. Join me. Come to the dark side of Japanese. It is your destiny.

「いろんな情報がいっパイン！」

OK, just to be sure we are all understanding the basics. 「いろんな」means various. It’s probably close enough to say that it is a variation of the word 「色々な」。「情報」simply means “information”. Now, for the bad joke part.

This is a play on words, involving the picture below. Remember, the pineapple is the speaker. To say pineapple in Japanese is パイナップル。Notice it begins with 「パイナ」which if you cut off your pronunciation of the 「ナ」would be 「パイン」, which are the last three letters of the pineapple’s statement. Normally to say “it has a lot of information”, you would say… 「情報がいっぱい」, as in the 「いっぱい」that means “a lot”. By adding an 「ん」on the end… you can say 「情報がいっパイン」.

Why would you want to say that you ask? Because it’s funny. You see… The PINEapple is speaking. 情報がいっパイン！ Get it!? PINE! This is one type of Japanese humor, usually called 親父ギャグ or literally, “old man jokes”.

If you make a pun like this around Japanese people, they will probably say 「さむい〜」(it’s cold!) in response.

「もう見てくレッタスか？」

This one is so bad it hurts. This is so forced, it’s almost difficult to figure out what the original Japanese was supposed to say!

The original Japanese is supposed to say, 「もう見てくれたっすか？」which is the slangy version of,「もう見てくれましたか？」, and means, “did you already see it?” The 「くれました」on the end gives it the sense that the customer seeing it as a favor for the company that created it. Review the 「くれた」「もらった」「あげた」grammar patterns if you forgot this one.

The slang, 「くれたっすか」has been changed to 「くレッタスか？」, because a head of lettuce (レッタス) is saying it…

Geesh.

「ご利用果＆菜！」

This is just ridiculous. You would read this, 「ごりようくだ＆さい」. The original Japanese should be… 「ご利用ください」. This is an extremely common phrase which means “please use it”, as in a service or product that a company or something is providing. See how「ごりようくだ＆さい」kind of sounds like that? But it’s more fun, because 「果」is the kanji in 「果物」that means “fruit”, and 「菜」is the kanji in 「野菜」which means “vegetable”. Pineapple… Lettuce… Fruits and vegetables.

That’s enough of that nonsense.

The Osaka Municipal Transportation Bureau… What a funny bunch of people!

- Harvey

Posted: July 30th, 2007 under Poster Ad.
Comments: none

Main menu:

Gear for your Brain

Kanji Reading Pop-Up

Site search

Categories

Archive

Recent Comments:

Blogroll

Personal

Learn Something?

Tip Box!

Japanese Jokes