Cultural misunderstandings are often hilarious. Thank god social news site Reddit has a complex sorting algorithm to find the very best.
Take the Phillippines, for instance. As redditor BAHOGILOK observed earlier today, the largest domestic terrorist group in his country is called the Moro Islamic Liberation Front or MILF. So English news headlines frequently read like this: “MILF warned against playing hardball in peace process,” “MILF sincerity questioned,” and so on. 
BAHOGILOK — whose name, he says, means smelly armpit in Filipino, and who is apparently well educated on the meaning of words like MILF in English — decided to poll the Reddit community.
He wanted to know: What MILF-like problems do you have where you live? In other words, what things are deathly serious in your country but funny when taken out of context?
Here are a few of the most enlightening answers:
Thecoss: “Berlusconi.”
Bullveh: “Motherfucking gum in Singapore. That shit is illegal.”
Timdub: “Fox News.”
Huppel: “I live in Ireland, close to a little town called Muff. If that wasn’t a bad enough name for a town, they decided to cement it into the history of name failures, by forming a diving club and naming it after the town. Don’t believe me? Muff Diving Club.They even have T-Shirts and fridge magnets.”
Duglett: “Fan death. It is taken very seriously in South Korea.” (From Wikipedia: “Fan death is a widely held belief prevailing in South Korea that an electric fan left running overnight in a closed room can cause the death of those inside.”)
Urnotindangr: “The american political system I’d imagine.”
incendiarypoop: “We don’t have hamsters in Australia. They are illegal to own or import, as they’d supposedly pose a credible invasive species threat. This must not be.”
So what’s taken seriously in your country that the rest of the world finds hilarious? Let us know in the comments.
Photo by Veeyawn
