An Arab and a Japanese girl walk into a bar...

Here's a funny story from my Contemporary Arab World class. My professor is Palestinian, and there is a Japanese student in my class. Both speak English as their second language and they do it quite well except when they mix up word choice, order, or tense. On Friday, the Japanese girl was presenting part of a group PowerPoint about the Prophet Muhammed's wives and the practice of polygamy in the Arab world. One of her group members took a good ten minutes to list off Muhammed's 12 wives and where and how the Prophet met them. Then the Japanese girl took over to explain polygamy's role in the modern Arab World. As an example, she presented a story about a man who, in 50 years, married and divorced 58 women (he only had a maximum of 4 wives at a time, as permitted by Islamic law). This staggering figure, as expected, prompted gasps from the audience, but what happened next was even more shocking.

The Japanese girl made a joke along the lines of, "I hope he isn't the Prophet Muhammed." What she meant to say was, "I'm glad that he wasn't the Prophet Muhammed" because if he were the prophet, then the previous speaker would have been talking all day about Muhammed's 58 wives. We all understood what she meant, and giggled at the joke. The professor however, was not laughing. "No!" she said, "there is only one Prophet Muhammed. Only one! He lived 1,400 years ago. This man is not the Prophet!" She got quite fired up and it took quite a bit of explaining to reassure her that the Japanese girl had not just blasphemed against Muhammed. It was absolutely hilarious. A non-native speaker trying to tell another non-native speaker a joke = a recipe for disaster.