The first time I ever “got” a Thai inside joke was a pretty big deal for me. Most foreigners live here with a more-or-less vague understanding of the behind the scenes to-and-fro that goes on, but when it comes to the double entendres and the wordplay, most of us are in the dark.

But years ago, when I was walking around Chatuchak Market, I saw a Thai guy wearing a t-shirt with a logo on it, and I did a double take. It was a simple graphic, but it had several layers of Thai subtext – and I got them! I gotta say, I was really happy for myself. Happy enough to be writing about it 9 years later, anyway, after it popped into my head today.

Here’s a very rough mockup of what was on this guy’s t-shirt:

So, a sort of pear-shaped blob of color with a misspelled Apple reference. Of course, any geek worth his or her weight in copper wire recognizes that those are the colors of the original Apple logo:

And anyone familiar with Thai cuisine worth their weight in…uh…custard apples, will know that’s not a pear, but a rose apple, otherwise known as chompoo:

Ok, so what? Well, at the time – around 2007 – the Prime Minster of Thailand was a guy named Samak Sundaravej, who was known for (among other things) his prominent nose, the shape of which was sometimes compared to a rose apple:

Okay, so…it’s a reference to a politician. Again, so what?

The cherry on top comes with the ‘iMak” text below the apple. Samak was sometimes shortened to simply “Mak,” and the “i” before it is an element of the Thai language – put that sound in front of a name or an insult and you increase the power of that insult by 10. So, calling someone “heeya” (เหี้ย, a lizard) is really bad, but calling them “ai-heeya” (ไอ้เหี้ย) is realllly bad, and will likely get you punched in the face, if you’re lucky.

So, after all that, the shirt was a geek-ified bit of wordplay expressing a dislike for a politician.

I know what you’re thinking: you wrote a whole blog post for that? Yeah, that’s right, I did, because that stuff isn’t easy to learn about a new culture. Imagine you’re new to North America and you see the below. Would you get it?

Are there any other inside jokes like this in Thai (or anywhere else) that made you proud to understand?