English: I went to your house and I was hungry, so I opened the refrigerator, and there were a bunch of roaches in there singing “We are the World, We are the Children.”
collected: Corona Plaza, Queens (04-30-2016)
origin: “I went to your house” jokes such as this one were common during Elementary school in the Bronx in the 1980s.
Tag Archives: cockroach
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Spanish:
English: Why are you dancing like you’re killing roaches?
collected: Corona Plaza, Queens (04-30-2016)
origin: Something you say to someone who can’t dance. Originally heard this from his grandmother in Ecuador.
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Arabic: خنفسه شافت عيالها على الحيط قالت ده لولى ملضم فى خيط
Khanfasa shafet ‘ayalha ‘ala al-hayt, qalet da luli mladdam fi khayt
English: Your mother is like a cockroach who saw her children on the wall but mistook them for beautiful pearls
collected: Riga, Latvia (08-01-2016)
origin: Egyptian insult joke, in Arabic. Usually said by grandmothers as a way to call someone ugly. The (very) literal translation is: “A beetle saw her kids on the wall and said pearls connected by a string.”
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“Your mama’s so broke, when I came into your house and dropped a cigarette butt, the roaches came out screaming, “Heat! Heat! We got heat!””
collected: Pittsburgh, Bloomfield neighborhood (9-18-14)
origin: heard it from her mom’s boyfriend, in the Homestead neighborhood of Pittsburgh (circa 2013)
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“Your house is so small the cockroaches walk humpback”
collected: Philadelphia, PA (12-7-12)
origin: South Eastern Alabama