Mondegreen Gag

Sherby? Shorby? Shore bee? Ah! Shore bee it is!

"I mean, what the crap was [Homestar] even saying there? 'Everybody, now bleed a beetle'? No! Ewww. 'Everybody, law deed will be dull'? Uhhhh, no kidding. 'Everybody, something the feed mill'?"

— Strong Bad commenting on Homestar Runner's site intro

A Mondegreen Gag is whenever one character mishears another and responds according to what they thought they heard. Sometimes this is caused by a character's accent, bad enunciation, or stressing of syllables, but it can also happen because of the environment, such as in a nightclub or on a busy street. If the character mispronounces their Rs, there may be a joke or two at their expense based on whatever mondegreen people heard. This can also happen due to words sharing the same sounds, such as "surely" and "Shirley." A mondegreen gag is an easy tool for writers to insert humor at a character's expense. Sometimes, they're shown to be unobservant or simple-minded, but other times they are merely the butt of a silly joke.

The term "mondegreen" was coined by Sylvia Wright, who wrote a 1954 essay about how, as a child, she had misheard a line from a Scottish ballad — "They hae slain the Earl o' Moray, and Lady Mondegreen." It wasn't until she was grown that she learned the line was in fact "and laid him on the green".

This can lead to Innocent Swearing if an innocent word is misheard as a profane one. Compare Rouge Angles of Satin, which is when the words are all technically real words but are misspellings of what was meant; and Gosh Dang It to Heck!, which is when made-up words are used to sound like profane ones. Can overlap with Funny Phone Misunderstanding, if it happens over the phone, Fun with Homophones, if the mishearing happens due to two words sounding the same, Heh Heh, You Said "X", if the people who mishear the word react to it with snickering, Poor Communication Kills, if the mishearing causes a lot of problems, Accent Depundent if the miscommunication is due to an accent, or In My Language, That Sounds Like..., if a language barrier is involved. If even the subtitles are uncertain what's being said, then that's Even the Subtitler Is Stumped. Contrast Malaproper, which is a character who mixes up words on a regular basis; Beam Me Up, Scotty!, when the misheard line becomes more famous than the original; Lady Mondegreen, which is when fans nickname a character based on what they misheard; Something Something Leonard Bernstein, which is when people understand part of a song but struggle to make up actual words from the rest; and Viewer Name Confusion, which is when the audience gets a character's name wrong. See also Virtual Assistant Blunder for when a computer misunderstands a voice command. See Calling Me a Logarithm for when somoene is mistakes a misheard or unfamiliar word for an insult.

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Eggs and pulls:

Add Bert, Thy Sing (Advertising)

• An advert for baby products in the UK, probably for nappies, talked about the need for your infant child to feel confident in their nudist coveries. It had to be clarified that the phrase was new discoveries.
• An ad for Cingular used this: two men are walking down the street and mangling the chorus of "Rock the Casbah" by The Clash. One sings it as "lock the cashbox", only to be briefly stunned when his friend sings it as "stop the catbox". He then agrees with that interpretation.
• The advertising campaign for Coke with Lime did this to Harry Nilsson's song "Coconut": You put the lime in the Coke, you nut...
• One Got Milk? commercial took place at a board meeting deciding what to name the Oreo cookie. One employee stuffs his face with cookies only to run out of milk before he can wash it down. When they call on him, his muffled "I don't know" sounds like "Oreo," which the boss loves.
• Invoked in a Kmart commercial about having store merchandise shipped to your house. It involves a male talking about how he can "ship [his] pants", obviously expecting the listener to hear "Ship" as "shit". A later ad promoting savings on gasoline from purchases in store did similarly with "big gas savings", expecting the listener to hear "big ass savings".
• Maxell tapes did a series of ads focusing on this. One advert mishears Desmond Dekker's "Israelites". And another one mishears The Skid's "Into The Valley".
  NC: Did they just add orgies to the Dollar Menu? [...] Is the secret sauce lubricant now?
• One ad for Comcast's "On Demand" service, has a man mangling the lyrics to "Born to be Wild" in the shower — and having Mr. T burst through his wall and reprimand him. No, seriously.
• A commercial for T-Mobile plays with this trope: A guy sings along with Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me", and mondegreens it into "Pour some shook-up ramen." His girlfriend is, of course, incredulous, and uses her T-Mobile cell phone to call the public library to get the librarian to look up the correct lyrics.
• A Volkswagen Passat commercial has several people mishearing a line from "Rocket Man". As the final line of the chorus plays, supermarket clerks, exercise enthusiasts, waitresses and of course, a man in the shower all take their turns messing up the lyrics. It's not until a couple gets behind the wheel of the Volkswagen Passat that someone gets the words right.

Al, Terminate Real Iffy Canes (Alternate Reality Games)

• Perplex City: One card is based on identifying misheard phrases and lyrics.

Any Maid and Monger (Anime & Manga)

• Delicious in Dungeon: Shuro is eventually revealed to be Japanese-like warrior whose name is Toshiro, but the Western-like cast misheard it.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • Todd's debut episode features this as an albeit Lost in Translation joke:
    Todd: You see... I am the number one Pokémon photo master!
    Misty and Brock: Did he say...
    Ash: Masker?
    Todd: That's right! I'm the... Not "masker", I said "master!"
  • Butch and Cassidy invoke this on Jessie and James, accusing them of corrupting the Team Rocket motto whenever their paths cross.
    • Butch and Cassidy rattle off the following lines:
      "To infect the world with devastation!
      To blight all people in every nation!
      To denounce the goodness of truth and love!
      To extend our wrath to the stars above!"
    • Compare those to what Jessie and James say:
      "To protect the world from devastation!
      To unite all peoples within our nation!
      To denounce the evils of truth and love!
      To extend our reach to the stars above!"
• In The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World, Red mishears Toby and Fou's explanation of "the former Royal Magic Wand who was banished from the Magic Tower" as "a former big ship who got banished from grape sugar" due to getting the memo via Translator Microbes. Red nods as if he understands through his thought indicate that he's clearly confused.
• Sailor Moon: Minako/Sailor Venus has a habit of mangling basic terms and idioms (i. e. promise ring as pro wrestling).
• Yotsuba&!: Characters tend to mishear Yotsuba anytime she sings.
• One for the One Piece anime—Robin originally hears their destination of Dressrosa as "Dress Oba", "oba" being the Japanese word for "old woman". Cue an Imagine Spot of an old woman wearing a dress.

Ey, Sean and Inmate Sean (Asian Animation)

• Mechamato: Two from the 2021 film trailer:
  • Many bystanders mistake the name "Mechamato" as "Mad Tomato", much to Amato's embarassment.
  • Pian mishears "Mechanise" as "make up nice", and Amato jokes that MechaBot can "make up" Pian nicely.

Come, Mah Dee (Comedy)

• "You fill out my census" ("You fill up my senses" from "Annie's Song" by John Denver). This common misheard version was naturally seized on by The Capitol Steps for one of their political song parodies.
• Johnny Rivers' "Secret Agent Man" is easily misheard as Secret Asian Man, and has been parodied as such at least twice, by the Capitol Steps as well as Da Vinci's Notebook.
• Australian/British comedian Bec Hill is known for this, presented in the form of flipcharts illustrated with the mondegreens.
• In Ellen DeGeneres's stand-up days, she discussed this.
  "Does he have it?" Is that what they're singing? "Does he have it?" Then you think to yourself "Why have I been singing 'Monkey hatchet?'" How many people have heard me sing "Monkey hatchet?" Then there are some songs that you don't even bother learning the words, because you assume that no-one knows the words. That Aretha Franklin song "Respect", that's been around a long time, and we always get to that part where "R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me. R-E-S-P-E-C-T, (Beat) coch-C-T HO!"
• George Carlin pulls this in a spoof of a commercial:
  Dad: Marge, I dunno what it is, what I mean to say that I don't know what it is. But I just can't get close enough to make a sale. Do you think I could have [forcefully] BAD BREATH??
  Marge: [coughs] It's possible, dad. You wilt the dandruff! You should try Listerine.
  Dad: Mr. Clean?
• South Carolina radio hosts Johnboy & Billy have recorded multiple bits about this trope, joking about it being an actual condition called "chronic lyricosis".
• Louis C.K. also has a bit lampshading this trope in regards to Manfred Mann's cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Blinded by the Light".
  You know that song "Blinded by the Light"? Whenever it said 'revved up like a deuce' I always thought it said 'your mother's cunt smells like oranges'. Strange how that works...
• In his stage act, comedian Michael Winslow used to do a version of "Purple Haze", changing the lyric to "'Scuse me while I kiss this fly", followed by screeches of "Help me! Help me!"
• John Denver's lyrics were skewered by Monty Python's Eric Idle on "John Denver being strangled" ("You came on my pillow...HYUUUNG!") ? and yes, Denver sued.
• Penn Jillette even joked about Paul McCartney's alleged poor grammar in "Live and Let Die" in front of a UK audience in Penn & Teller: Fool Us (He says "This ever-changing world in which we're livin'" but it sounds more like "This ever-changing world in which we live in").
• Peter Kay has an entire routine built around this sort of thing, such as suggesting Michael Jackson is assuring his listener in "You Are Not Alone" that "your burgers are the best" (it's "your burdens I will bear") or that Duffy is "begging you for birdseed" ("mercy"). Funniest of all, in the song "Drive" by The Cars, the singer does a little vocal styling right before the chorus that really does sound like he's saying "pork pie": "Can't go on, thinkin...nothin's wrong...pork pie..." Once you hear it, you can't unhear it.
• The Vacant Lot comedy troupe has a skit dedicated to mondegreens in the Manfred Mann cover of Bruce Springsteen's Blinded by the Light: "ripped up douches"; "loofah sponges" and the "foreman of the night;" and one that's completely incomprehensible. The original version is actually far less susceptible to mondegreens — Springsteen sings "cut loose like a deuce" as opposed to (what sounds like) "revved up like a douche".
• In one set, Johnny Lampert bemoans his parents' staggering inability to hear song lyrics correctly, particularly his father. This causes him no end of torment whenever he's in the car with them and the radio is playing, since they like to sing along.
  • "Big ol' jet airliner" becomes "Bingo Jed had a light on".
  • "The girl with kaleidoscope eyes" becomes "the girl with colitis goes by", followed by his mother joining in with "Lucy's in a fight with Linus!"
  • "Oh-oh here she comes/She's a maneater" becomes "Oh-oh here she comes/She's a bad reader".
  • "You may be right/I may be crazy" becomes "You made the rice/I made the gravy".
  • And lastly, "Don't let the sun go down on me" becomes "Don't let your son go down on me".
• In one stand-up set, Tig Notaro tells a story about an employee at the Toronto airport suggesting she wait for her flight in "the make believe lounge" on the fourth floor. Tig comes away from the discussion thinking they were "a little weirdo" who was making an extremely dry joke, but decides to get on the elevator and see what's actually on the fourth floor - where she immediately sees a big sign reading "Welcome to the Maple Leaf Lounge".

Come, Mick Boocks (Comic Books)

• Amelia Rules!: Aunt Tanner uses her own mondegreening of "Still Rock'n'Roll to Me" by Billy Joel in An Aesop about why she still believes in Santa Claus:
  Tanner: "You shouldn't try to be a straight-A student if you already think too much."
  Amelia: Heh, heh. That's pretty good.
  Tanner: I thought so! It was, like, my motto — for years! But the thing is, one day I read the lyrics and they were completely different! "Should I try to be a straight-A student? If you are, then you think too much." ... I was devastated! But even knowing the new lyrics, it never replaced the one I'd made up... Do you know what I'm saying?
  Amelia: Um... yeah. Santa is like Billy Joel... are, and the lyrics are Rudolph, and... actually, no.
• DC Comics:
  • In a New Year's special, Dick Grayson teases Barbara Gordon for having once thought "Auld Lang Syne" was about an "Old Lane Sign."
  • Green Arrow: In one issue of the story arc "Quiver," we learn that Stephanie Brown originally mistook Ra's al Ghul's name as "Rasta Guy."
• The Hair Bear Bunch: In the comic adaptation, the characters escape to a western town ("Wild Wild West Wingding", issue #7, Gold Key) where the townspeople live in fear of an outlaw named Sandy Claws. The bears mistake it as Santa Claus and start festooning the town with Christmas decorations.
• Hawkeye: "Hawkguy" is what Matt Fraction's son kept calling Hawkeye. It eventually shaped the character's portrayal in Hawkeye (2012), made its way into issue 6, and has become the unofficial nickname of Vol. 4.
• Preacher: When Jesse, Tulip, and Cass sing along to "What a Feeling" by Irene Cara in "Dixie Fried", they sing the line "got me reelin'" instead of "bein's believin'".
• Vampirella/Shi: In the crossover, when Vampirella first hears her name (some baddies fear the "Shi-Killer"), she quips: "She-Killer? How generic!" Could of course be a Pun/Take That! instead. (As all crossovers fights are essentially drawn — for not insulting either fan group — Shi returns the favor by always calling her a Hannaya, a type of Japanese vampire, annoying her to no end.)

Come, Mick Streeps (Comic Strips)

• Bloom County:
  • One strip had Opus the penguin mangling "The Star-Spangled Banner" when he finds himself unable to remember the lyrics ("Oh say can you see, by the dawn's early light / what so proudly we snailed, at, um, the starlight's last cleaning...").
  • A Sunday Strip from September 1988 had that year's Presidential candidates George H. W. Bush, Michael Dukakis and Bill D. Cat each translate the notoriously Indecipherable Lyrics of "Louie Louie" based on what they could understand, as if it would tell the public something about them all. Since the ad was sponsored by Bill's Meadow Party, it takes jabs at Bush ("Iran-Contra thing makes me phlegm") and Dukakis ("Kitty she leads me everywhere") while saying Bill's gibberish translation, half of which outright defies transcription, "reveals a simple honesty."
• Calvin and Hobbes has Calvin intentionally mondegreen the pledge of allegiance as "I pledge allegiance to Queen Fragg, and her mighty state of hysteria...", and getting in trouble for it.
• The comic Da'n'Dill, while it was in the Australian kids' magazine K-Zone, had one strip where the strip's main Butt-Monkey was buried up to his neck on the beach and found himself stuck in the bottom of the cooler of a beachgoing family. His attempts to alert them are drowned out when Cold Chisel's "Cheap Wine" comes on the radio with the chorus of "Cheap wine and a three day-hey growth" (of beard), and one of the beachgoers turns it up and belts out, "Chief lime and his three-legged goat."
• The Family Circus kids are known to mishear what the adults say.
• Gasoline Alley has the Wallet family attend a community singalong of "God Bless America." The line is supposed to be "coming down with a light from above," but the child Ada, full of patriotism but not enough practice, proudly sings that line as "coming down with a light from a bulb." Yes, light bulbs are an American invention, but they don't occur in that particular song.
• Peanuts: Sally is the queen of these.
  • One story arc has Sally preparing for a Christmas pageant in which "I come out and say, 'Hark!', then Harold Angel starts to sing." Everyone assumes that she's simply confused by the name of the song...until a kid named Harold Angel actually shows up.
  • Sally was known for these kinds of blunders. In another Christmas strip, she recites: "The stockings were hung by the chimney with care/In hopes that Jack Nicklaus soon would be there." In yet another, she tells her class the story of "Santa Claus and his rain gear."
• The Perishers:
  • Baby Grumpling owns a cross-eyed teddy bear named Gladly, in reference to one of the jokes listed on this page.
  • Characters often accuse each other of "casting nasturtiums"^note aspersions when they think they're being defamed.
  • Tatty Oldbitt spent several episodes convinced she had been sent on a mission to Scapa Flow. It turned out some (probably drunk) humans had shouted "Scarper!" after pushing a bottle in her direction.
• Pogo:
  • "Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly" is perpetually mondegreened as "Deck Us All with Boston Charlie", and then again with Beauregard the Dog claiming that the lyrics are actually "Bark Us All Bow-Wows of Folly" (though the latter song is often mistakenly appended to the end of "Boston Charlie" these days), and then again when a hungry turtle sang the lyrics as "Dunk Us All In Bowls Of Barley."
  • Even the "Deck Us All With Boston Charlie" itself got mondegreened at one point, as "Tinkle, Salty Boss Anchovy." Which caused Churchy La Femme to lament that "The way he's singing it, it don't make no sense!"
• Rugrats: The tie-in comic strip at least twice had the characters sing a badly mondegreened Yankee Doodle. One strip has Chuckie standing on a crack in the sidewalk. Angelica asks him what he's doing and he says he's been told that if he stands on a crack, he'll bring his mother back. Angelica starts to correct him, only to realize what he just said, so she just asks him if he sees anything yet.
• Wild Life: Carson the Muskrat thinks the lyrics to his favorite U2 song are "I still haven't found Walter's cookie jar" (I still haven't found what I'm looking for)

Faint Twerks (Fan Works)

• Across the Time:
  Hermione: Yup. Daphne Greengrass. Like I said, she's in our year. It wasn't a surprise that not many really knew her or aware she existed. She keeps mostly to herself that Greengrass girl. Most of her housemate called her The Ice Queen of Slytherin.
  Ron: The Ice Cream of Slytherin? That's an odd title to be given to a girl, don't you think?'
• Fortunate Son: Harri comes up with a rather interesting interpretation of Atomic Kitten's "Whole Again".
  Baby you're the one, you can make me come,
  You can feel my hole again.
• Harry Potter's Secret Weapon:
  • Ginny asks if Harry's ring is an heir ring and Ron asks why Harry would be wearing an earring.
  • Dumbledore, while waiting to be tried, calls unsuccessfully for a rescue from his phoenix Fawkes. The guard believes that he's requesting fox for his next meal.
• I Hope You're Prepared For An Unforgettable Wedding!:
  Homer Simpson: Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to join these two in holy macaroni.
  Superintendent Chalmers: (whispering) It's "matrimony".
  Homer Simpson: D'OH!
• In Luminosity, Elspeth as a very young child is told she's being taken to "see some friends in Alaska", which she misinterprets:
  I don't know what a laska is. Maybe they have nice food there? Do we have to go to the laska to get me nicer food from our friends?
• Madoka Abridged has Madoka Breaking the Fourth Wall to play this for laughs on the (actually meaningless) lyrics in Mami's theme song.
  Madoka: Yummy, oh yummy... lick my feet and I'm such a boss you're a lesbian... Mami, what the hell kind of song is this?
• The Nightmare House: Lucy's nightmare has people chanting, "Join us, Lucy", "Join

us now," and her own name. Initially, she mishears this as "Moist and juicy", "Moistened mound", and "Juicy mound".

• Nurse Jet: Jet mangles "Bless you" into "Dress you".
• Parenting Class: Ginny denies her attraction to Harry while Hermione is half-asleep in her jello.
  Ginny: He's only a friend!
  Hermione: Bees only say end? What did you say Ginny?

Fiends — Any Mate, Sean? (Films — Animation)

• Cars: When Lightning discovers that Doc is the Hudson Hornet, he tries to tell the others, explaining that he had three Piston Cups. Mater mishears it as Hudson doing something unsanitary.
  Mater: (Spit Take) He did what in his cups?
• Cars 2: Near the end, Mater, Finn McMissile, and Holly Shiftwell are all captured by the Lemons and are trapped inside a giant clock tower in London, England. As the Lemons proceed to drop Mater into the clock's gears to shred him alive, the tow truck immediately yells, "Dad gum!", and as a result he deploys his weapons Finn and Holly gave him and blasting away the ropes suspending them over the clock gears, therefore freeing himself and allowing them to escape. ^note  This is actually a firing of a Chekhov's Gun from earlier in the movie, where Mater has problems with the voice-activation of his spygear.
• A Claymation Christmas Celebration: Throughout the movie, various characters flub "Here We Come A-Wassailing" with their own interpretations; Dogs selling waffles sing, "Here we come a-waffling", geese sing, "Here we come a-waddling" and pigs sing, "Here we come a-wallowing", Rex tries to correct them, but can't because he nor anyone else knows what it means to wassail. At the end, a carload of elves drive up and explain that to wassail is to go around singing carols and receiving Christmas treats.
• Despicable Me: Gru instructs Dr. Nefario to make cookie robots and a dart gun, but due to his old age, he mishears this as "boogie robots" and "fart gun", so he makes robots that dance and a gun that shoots a foul-smelling gas.
• Despicable Me 2: At the end, the minions cover "I Swear" (specifically, the version by All-4-One; the minions that sing it are dressed up like them). Being the minions, they mondegreen the entire song; most noticeably, they sing the line "And I swear" as "Underwear".
• The Flight of Dragons: The closed captioning for the official VHS releases frequently substitute the word "horn" for the actual word "hoard".
• Flushed Away: Roddy protests to the thugs looking for Rita that he's just an innocent bystander. They now think that Roddy's name is Millicent Bystander.
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney): The gargoyles mishear Esmeralda telling Quasimodo "Looks like Frollo's wrong about the both of us." as "Frollo's nose is long, and he wears a truss."^note A truss is a tricorn-like headdress worn by judges in the Middle Ages. It's also an archaic device used to treat hernias.
  • Originally, there was supposed to be one during the revolt scene. When Phoebus rallies the troops by yelling "will we allow it?!" the gargoyles convey it as "he said someone stole his wallet."
• Olive, the Other Reindeer has this set off the plot. Upon hearing on the radio that one of Santa's reindeer is injured and that they'll be counting on "all of the other reindeer," Olive decides that Santa did not say this, but the title, and that she is not a dog at all, and that she is in fact, a reindeer. So she goes to the North Pole to prove it. A bus driver later tells Olive that he used to think the pledge of Allegiance was about him, Richard Stands. As in, "And to the Republic, for Richard Stands." There is also a character named "Round John Virgin" a common Mondegreen for the words "Round yon virgin" in "Silent Night".
• Popeye: An All-CGI Cartoon by Sony Pictures released a teaser in 2016 that opens with Popeye and Olive asea on Popeye's boat when objects start falling from the sky and splashing in the ocean. Once Olive gets a good look, she realizes that these are pirates that are catapulting themselves as a means of hostile boarding. "It's raining men!" the Damsel in Distress cries, to which the inimitable Popeye remarks, "How peculiar." This is a mondegreen of the 1983 pop song "It's Raining Men" by The Weather Girls. The following line should be "Hallelujah!" not "How peculiar."
• A Silent Voice: Shouya mishears Shouko confessing her love for him ("suki" in Japanese) as "moon" (tsuki in Japanese), due to her speech being too difficult for him to understand.
• Tintin: A Running Gag with Professor Calculus, who is half-deaf, and so often mishears things comically, such as mishearing "hat" for "cat" or "state" for "estate".
• The background music for one of the official trailers of Turning Red, is *NSYNC's "It's Gonna Be Me", which can be misheard as "It's gonna be Mei" (i.e. the main character). Pretty much invoked with a line edited from "You might been hurt, babe" to "You might been hurt, Mei".
• Winnie the Pooh:
  • Pooh's Grand Adventure: Pooh and friends journeyed to rescue Christopher Robin from the terrible land of Skull. Actually he'd just gone to school — the mistake came about because Christopher's message became smeared with honey and because Owl, who did the deciphering, can't read as well as he thinks he can.
  • Winnie the Pooh (2011): Pooh and his friends thought that Christopher Robin was kidnapped by a monster known as the Backson because Pooh actually mistranslated Christopher's message "I'll be back soon."

Fiends — Like Axiom (Films — Live-Action)

• 9 to 5: Dick accuses Judy of being into S&M. She hears it as "M&M", somewhat defusing her impact when she tries repeating it during her "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
  Judy: ...and if I want to play sex games or do M&M's, you can't stop me.
  Dick: M&M's?
• 27 Dresses: Jane and Kevin are in a bar when "Benny and the Jets" comes on. They have a small argument about the lyrics, with Jane settling on "She's got electric boobs and mohair shoes" (It's "electric boots, a mohair suit").
• Airplane!: Among the many gags-a-minute in the film, many of them rely on homophone confusions, most famously:
  Dr. Rumack: Can you fly this plane and land it?
  Ted: Surely, you can't be serious.
  Dr Rumack: I am serious, and don't call me Shirley.
• Angels in the Outfield: Some of the baseball players think that the first line of "The Star-Spangled Banner" is "Jose, can you see," prompting one of them to comment, "Wow. It's about a Spanish guy!"
• Animal Crackers: Groucho asks Chico to play a song about Montreal: "I'm a dreamer, Montreal." This is a mangled reference to the De Sylva, Brown & Henderson song "Aren't We All?"
• The Big Lebowski: The Dude is trying to use a quote by Lenin, but can't remember the exact phrasing. Donny mishears it as "Lennon" (as in, John Lennon) and begins unhelpfully quoting Beatles songs until Walter tells him to shut up.
• Bull Durham: Nuke botches the lyrics to "Try a Little Tenderness", to Crash's irritation. "She may get wooly..."
  Crash: Goddamn, I hate people that get the words wrong.
• Doctor... Series:
  • Eva from Doctor at Large speaks with a lisp; when Dr. Sparrow tells her to take some big breaths, she thinks he means big breasts and remarks that they are for a thixteen-year-old.
  • In Doctor in Trouble, after Wendover says, "bomb holes", Satterjee mistakenly believes he said "bumholes".
• The Flint Street Nativity: Zoe thinks the lyrics to "Silent Night" include the line "Round John Verger" in place of "Round yon' virgin". Her drawing of a nativity scene includes a large man looming behind the manger to depict "John Verger". Debbie, who's playing Mary, ends up singing the incorrect lyric during the play.
• Get Smart: Maxwell Smart tries to pick gum off his shoe with a match on a plane, which makes the other passengers think his shoe is a bomb. He tries to explain that it's just gum, but the other passengers freak out because they think he said he has a gun, and he gets arrested by the federal marshal.
• Godmothered: Eleanor doesn't know what "Pilates" is, so when Mackenzie says "Pilates" Eleanor assumes she must have meant "Pirates."
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2:
  • When Drax asks Peter about the name of the batteries they were hired to save, he somehow confuses the word "Anulax" for Harbulary".
  Peter Quill That's nothing like what I just said.
  • Nebula calls Gamora a "Garden of the Galaxy". Gamora corrects her that they're "Guardians" — why would they be the "Gardens of the Galaxy"?
• Hedwig and the Angry Inch: Hedwig is listening to Tommy's version of "The Origin of Love." Instead of "Osiris" he says "The sirens" on the recording (for which he claims writing credit). He tries to talk his way out by saying there were two versions of the lyrics and she says "There's one version and you fucked it up!"
• Heroes has the Vietnam veteran Jack Dunne recount a buddy's mondegreen during a firefight. The man, feeling overwhelmed, cried out "Save us, Howard! Save us, Howard!" Jack's traveling companion, Carol Bell, wonders "Who's Howard?" Jack explains, "Our Father, who art in Heaven, Howard be thy name."
• I Give It a Year: The main couple Nat and Josh argue over misheard song lyrics. Nat thinks the lyrics from "Sweet Dreams Are Made of This" go "I travelled the world in generic jeans" instead of "I travelled the world and the seven seas", much to Josh's chagrin. She also thinks the line from "We Built This City" goes "we built this city on the wrong damn road". Josh also brings up the lyrics from "Tiny Dancer", which Nat thinks goes "hold me close and tie me down sir".
• In America: Ariel thinks The Star-Spangled Banner goes "José can you see", but Christy corrects her.
• James and the Giant Peach: When the bugs show James that his appearance has changed, he realizes that it was caused by the magic crocodiles' tongues as he tells them that the man who gave them to him said that marvelous things would happen with them. The Glowworm, who's a little hard of hearing, thinks James said "marvelous pigs in satin", but the Grasshopper corrects her.
• Jumpin' Jack Flash. Terry has to write down the lyrics for "Jumpin' Jack Flash" in the days before you could look them up on the internet, and has some difficulty working out what Mick Jagger is singing.
  "I was raised by two lesbians? [clip] Mick, Mick, Mick...speak English!"
• Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: When Perry tells Harry, "I'm talking money!" from a distance away, Harry responds, "What? 'Talking monkey'...?" Perry, who has a very dim opinion of Harry's intelligence, just starts riffing, "Yes, a talking monkey. Came back here from the future. Ugly sucker. Only says 'ficus.'"
• Lion: Played for Drama, as young Saroo's mispronunciation of the name of his hometown Ganesh Talai as Kanestalee makes it impossible for authorities to help track down his family.
• The Long Kiss Goodnight: Samuel L. Jackson misquotes England Dan and John Ford Coley's "I'd Really Love to See You Tonight" when he sings, "I'm not talking 'bout the linen," and Geena Davis corrects him that the song is actually saying, "I'm not talking about moving in."
• Mexican Hayride: While getting interviewed, Bascom mishears "consonants" as "continents", and starts naming "North America" and more before getting cut off.
• Monty Python's Life of Brian: At the beginning of the film, Jesus gives the Sermon on the Mount to a large crowd of observers. However, the ones at the back have a hard time understanding Him because of the distance, and one guy consequently mishears "blessed are the peacemakers" as "blessed are the cheesemakers" and "blessed are the meek" as "blessed are the Greek." The first mishearing sparks a minor debate over its (nonexistent) meaning, while the second is quickly corrected by another audience member's wife.
• Moscow on the Hudson: Vlad tells Lionel, a security guard, "I defect". Lionel thinks he's saying "defecate", and directs him to the men's bathroom.
  Lionel: Not here, you don't. There's a men's room down the hall.
• The Muppets:
  • The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson: When Fozzie tells Scooter that the Jim Henson tribute should be a "biking number", Scooter assumes he said "Viking number" and brings in a horde of Vikings to perform in the number.
    Fozzie: I said a biking number! You know, bikes, bicycles, as in "Schwinn"?
    Scooter: We don't have a Schwinn. We got a Sven.
  • Muppets Most Wanted: Constantine sings the verse "The lovers, the dreamers, and me" of "The Rainbow Connection" as "The lovers, the dreamers, and cheese".
• No Kidding:
  • David hears Fenella's name as "Vanilla" on the phone with her aunt, so he writes her down on the list of children as such.
  • The District Nurse is hard of hearing, which leads her to believe that Vanilla is pregnant with triplets and not realise Matron wants her out of Chartham Place:
    Matron: I am Matron here!
    District Nurse: Nothing "queer" about it at all, happens all the time.
• Please Turn Over: When News of the World calls the Halliday household and Beryl answers the phone:
  Beryl: "Sterilization"? I am list'nin'! Oh, "serialization".
• The Pumaman: Tony's friend Martin somehow mishears (or misremembers) "Puma Man" as "Sandwich Man".
• Mrs. Deevens from Raising the Wind is hard of hearing, and the students struggle to communicate with her. When Malcolm tries to explain to her that his surname is "Stewart", not "Tenant", she thinks he is talking about the weather and starts going on about the rain.
• Role Models references "I want to Rock and Roll" with, "I like to rock and roll part of every day. I can only rock and roll from three to five."
• Royal Rendezvous: When Rory interrupts Cat's bath to ask for her help, she covers up with a Modesty Towel and goes to answer the door while yelling "Coming". But he mishears "Come in" so he goes inside, which ends up surprising her and causing an awkward Accidental Pervert moment as her towel suffers a Wardrobe Malfunction due to the sudden movement.
• The Santa Clause:
  • When Scott is reading Twas the Night Before Christmas to his son in the first movie, his son mistakes "arose such a clatter" for "a Rose Suchak ladder". This turns out to be justified.
  • The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause: Mother Nature tells Jack Frost that he is accused of trying to upstage Santa in a series of acts that are "willful and malicious" but Jack Frost misinterprets it as "skillful and delicious".
• Skyfall: Bond introduces M and Kincade to each other. Later Kincade calls her by the name "Emma", presumably thinking he had heard an abbreviation of the name rather than a code letter.
• Things Are Tough All Over: After Mr. Slyman gets a hair transplant, both Prince Habib (who is eating when he says it) and Mr. Slyman, with an accent, say what sounds like "better than herpes", with Slyman explaining to the doctor what sounds like him having herpes on his head, freaking out the doctor who was not told earlier, but he soon learns that Slyman is actually talking about his hair piece.
• The Tuxedo: The last thing that Clark Devlin says before going into a coma from an assassination attempt is "water strider". Jimmy Tong mistakes this for "Walter Strider", leading to a wild goose chase where he tries to catch this imaginary character, believing him to be responsible for the attack.
• The Way, Way Back: Joan starts singing along to "Kyrie" by Mr. Mister, but she thinks the refrain is "carry a laser" instead of "kyrie eleison".
  Kip: Are you saying "carry a laser?"
  Joan: That's what it is...
  Kip: Why would anyone write a song called "Carry a Laser?"
  Joan: Because... they like outer space.
• This is Spın̈al Tap: When talking about the spontaneous combustion of the drummer Peter 'James' Bond, the rockers mention they were playing on a festival in the Isle of Lucy.
• When Lurcio and the Christian plan how to escape from the condemned cell in Up Pompeii:
  Christian: 'Ere, what about the Trojan 'Orse.
  Lurcio: Why, what do they do? (Beat) Oh, the Trojan Horse, yes!
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine: When Logan addresses the very overweight Fred J. Dukes as "bub", Fred gets mad because he mishears it as "Blob". (Fred J. Dukes would actually become the mutant known as the Blob).

Joes (Jokes)

• A woman greets her son as he comes home from Sunday School. "So what did you do today?" "We sang a song about a bear!" "A bear?" "Yes! Gladly, the cross-eyed bear!"
• This joke:
  Teacher: Can anyone use "officiate" in a sentence?
  Student: A man got sick because of officiate.
  • Similarly:
    Teacher: Who can give a sentence using the word "counterfeit"?
    Little Susie: I didn't know if she was a centipede or a millipede so I had to counterfeit.
• An Asian man enters a currency exchange outlet in New York's Times Square. Approaching the clerk with 100 US dollars, the man requests for it to be converted to Taiwanese currency. The clerk (a white guy) gave him 2,900 Taiwan dollars in return.
  A couple months later, the same Asian man enters the same outlet, again with 100 American dollars, once again to be converted to Taiwanese currency. This time, he gets 2,750 Taiwan dollars instead.
  "Last time I change, get 2,900, why this time is less?" the Asian man asked.
  The clerk, busy with his work, replies without looking, "Fluctuations."
  The Asian man looks utterly disgusted, and walks off with his money and a dirty look on his face. As he leaves, he turns around and shouts, "Well, fluc you Americans too!"
• This joke:
  Teacher: Make a sentence with the word "fascinate."
  Student: "I have nine buttons on my shirt but I can only fascinate."
• This among Harry Potter fans, especially during current economic climes:
  "Expecto patronum"? I thought you said "expensive petroleum"!
• An old joke has two Mexican guys driving down the road when they nearly sideswipe a pedestrian:
  Guy 1: "Oye, I think you almost ran over a guy from Florida!"
  Guy 2: "Why do you think he's from Florida?"
  Guy 1: "Because he's back there yelling something about 'sunny beaches'."

Litter at Church (Literature)

• 11/22/63: One of the characters Jack Epping meets is called "Silent Mike", because when little he misheard the song "Silent Night", thinking it was all about him.
• All About Sam renders the Pledge of Allegiance as the Pled Jelly-Juntz. Justified as the protagonist is four years old.
• Andy Griffiths' Just Series: In the story "Dum-Dum" in "Just Stupid", Andy gets into an argument with a boy named Bradley of about five, who misheard the "L-M-N-O-P" part of the alphabet song as "ennel-mennel-bee" and insists those are the lyrics.
• Journalist and Rolling Stone editor Gavin Edwards had written numerous books on this topic (before the Internet made reading and sharing mondegreens easy) in the 1990s, which were collections of these sent in by readers, such as 'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy, He's Got The Whole World In His Pants, When a Man Loves a Walnut, and Deck The Halls With Buddy Holly.
• The Baby-Sitters Club: An early book has BSC client Jamie Newton singing the first verse of "Home on the Range" in this fashion. In his defense, he's only three.
  "Oh, give me a comb
  Where the buffalo foam
  Where the deer and the antelope pay
  Where seldom is heard
  A long-distance bird
  And the sky is not crowded all day."
• Bleeding Edge: A bunch of dot-commers in a karaoke bar misinterpret a line from Toto's "Africa" as "I left my brains down in Africa." ("I bless the rains down in Africa.")
• Can Bears Ski is about a young bear who keeps hearing people asking him the same unusual question, "Can bears ski?" After getting hearing aids, he discovers that the question he's been hearing is actually "Can you hear me?"
• In the Carl Hiaasen novel Sick Puppy, a Running Gag about Palmer, one of the bad guys of the novel, is his tendency towards this, introduced when he says, "I read the newspaper today, oh boy."
• The Catcher in the Rye: The title comes from an in-universe mondegreen, Holden mishears the song "Comin' Thru the Rye" and adopts this mistaken phrase as his future purpose in life, forming a mental image of himself catching kids who are running around in a rye field (which is inexplicably placed on "some crazy cliff,") which to him is symbolic of protecting them from adult themes, especially sex. The song is actually, very ironically, about two lovers meeting to have sex in a rye field.
• The children in one Chrestomanci book deliberately mishear the lyrics to a hymn as 'Gladly my cross-eyed bear.' They then switch it around to 'Crossley my glad-eyed bear' to describe one of the teachers they actually like and give him the nickname Teddy as a result.
• Churchmouse Stories: Played for Drama in "Gabriel and the Moths". Gabriel thinks Parson Pease-Porridge plans to replace him after hearing him say he's getting a new cat because the current one's moth-eaten. He actually heard him talking about getting a new hat.
• Dave Barrys Book Of Bad Songs
  • Dave Barry has an entire section on mondegreens. Ironically, it's in a different section that he awards the "Certificate of Redundancy Certificate" to Paul McCartney and Wings for the line (from "Live and Let Die"), "But if this ever-changing world in which we live in..." not knowing that the actual line goes, "But if this ever-changing world in which we're livin'..."
  • He mentions the song "Help Me Rhonda" wherein he says the opening lyrics sound like "Well, since she put me down, there's been owls puking in my bed." He later references the infamous "Blinded By the Light" (see above) by saying that of course the line isn't "Wrapped up like a douche, another runner in the night". No, it's "Wrapped up like a douche, there's been owls puking in my bed."
• Doom: In Doom: Endgame, Fly and Arlene are being connected to the Newbie computer simulation, and he sees Arlene mouth a message to him: "Patrick". Fly has absolutely no idea what she's trying to convey with that message or how it could help them, all that comes to mind is the story of Saint Patrick who converted the Irish. Once in the computer, he decides to trust Arlene and attempts to convert the monsters. He succeeds and rallies a growing army of the enemy, awed by his Reality Warper powers. Once they regroup in the computer, Fly learns that she said "battery", as in "Cut the Juice".
• Edenborn: Penny claims that her name is from a Lung Butter lyric "play Penelope", actually "play the melody" according to another character. It's unclear whether she reached this on her own or if her mother misinformed her.
• Father Brown: In the story "The Absence of Mr. Glass", there is no Mr. Glass blackmailing Mr. Todhunter over some dark secret; Todhunter is learning to be an illusionist, and was merely thinking out loud while practicing juggling: "Two, three ? missed a glass." Add to that the fact that British English drops post-vocalic R's...
• In Ellen Raskin's Figgs and Phantoms Mona Lisa Figg discovers some sheet music for Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeomen of the Guard in her late uncle's effects and realizes that what her parents have been singing for years as "tis but pickles sister keeps" is actually "tis but mickle sister reaps."
• The Go-Go's: An interview with Jane Weidlin revealed that a live performance in Australia had the audience call for "Alex The Seal." It wasn't until the set was done that it dawned on the group that they were calling for "Our Lips Are Sealed."
• Good Omens: There's a running joke about how all cassette tapes left in cars will eventually metamorphose into tapes of "The Greatest Hits of Queen". Crowley listens to the song "Radio Ga Ga", hearing the lyrics "All we need is Radio Ga Ga". It's actually "All we hear is Radio Ga Ga." Another time, he wonders who Moey and Chandon are. ^note  The lyrics are "She keeps some Moët & Chandon in her pretty cabinet".
• The Ground Beneath Her Feet: A character has the magical ability to hear in his mind songs that will become hits three years into the future, but sometimes the lyrics come out garbled. When he heard Bob Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind", he thought the chorus went "The ganja my friend is growing in the tin..."
• Hilary Tamar: One of these triggers a Red Herring in Thus Was Adonis Murdered. In the lead-up to the murder, Julia overhears a conversation with the line "Bruce stole an armchair and a rococo mirror I rather liked". Several efforts are made to find out more about Bruce; it's not until the final act that Hilary reveals that Bruce never existed. What Julia, "who is not well up on the baroque and rococo periods", overheard was actually "Brustolon armchair and a rococo mirror I rather liked", Andrea di Brustolon being a celebrated furniture maker in the seventeenth century.
• Imperial Radch: Breq is a serial collector of songs, but between the variety of languages they're in and the heavy implication that her last remaining body is tone deaf, comprehension on the part of the people around her is somewhat spotty. At one point, one of the squads under her command, all drunk as skunks, performs one of her favourites, "My Heart is a Fish", by substituting the Radchaai words the actual lyrics sound like, leading to lines like, "Oh, tree! Where is my ass?"
• In The Year Of The Boar And Jackie Robinson has the Chinese protagonist mangling the Pledge of Allegiance on her first day of school in the US:
  Shirley: I pledge a lesson to the frog of the United States of America. And to the wee puppet, for witches' hands, one Asian, in the vestibule, with little tea and just rice for all.
• Isaac Asimov:
  • "Battle Hymn": This Feghoot, builds up to the punchline that the title of the French National Anthem is pronounced "Mars Say Yes".
  • Forward the Foundation: During "Dors Venabili", Wanda is in Seldon's office and has what she believes is a dream, in which two men are talking about "lemonade death". It turns out that it had not been a dream, and that the two men are plotting to kill Dors with a machine called the Elar-Monay device.
• Kirby (Light Novel): In the first book, Kirby and the Dangerous Gourmet Mansion!?, the owner of the titular mansion is Madame Parfaitsky, which sounds like "I like parfait" (parfait [ga] suki) in Japanese. So, when Waddle Dee first tells Kirby about her moving to Dream Land, Kirby mishears him and starts asking him what flavor of parfait he likes.
• Listen Buddy: Buddy rarely pays attention, so he often mishears what his parents tell him to do as something else. For example, his mother tells him to cut some bread, so he cuts his bed instead. This later gets him into trouble when he repeatedly mishears the Scruffy Varmint's orders until the latter reaches his Rage Breaking Point and threatens to have him made into rabbit soup.
• The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet: There exists, well, the approximate equivalent of alien punk rock, detailing the sex life of local royalty, but for someone who can't speak the alien language, "Soskh Matsh Mae'ha" (whatever obscenity that is) comes out as "Socks Match My Hat".
• Lovecraft Country: The character thinks the war memorial photo is "our Dennis", but the parents referred to the Ardennes.
• In the children's book Miss Alaineus, the protagonist mishears the word "miscellaneous" as the title, and assumes it's a person's name.
• Mode: When Colene was as a child, heard the song lyric "Mares eat oats" as "Maresy Doats" and named her toy stuffed horse after the misheard lyric. (Incidentally, the song "Mairzy Doats" was deliberately written so as to inspire this exact mishearing.)
• A Monk Swimming by Malachy McCourt (a memoir of growing up in Ireland and moving to America) uses a mondegreen from the prayer "Hail Mary" — "blessed art thou amongst women".
• Moongobble and Me: The Rusty Knight is hard of hearing, and is rather prone to these. In book 1 alone, as a few examples, he mishears "doom" as "gloom", and "cheese" as "fleas".
• The Muller Fokker Effect has the following version of The Star-Spangled Banner:
  Ofay can you pee
  By the dong's surly blight
  What you probably inhaled
  At the toilet's last cleaning.
• When Abby and Gretchen first become friends in My Best Friend's Exorcism, "We Got The Beat" by The Go-Go's starts playing, and Abby cites the lyrics... or rather, what she thought the lyrics were when she was in fourth grade, when the scene takes place. The mondegreens actually become plot-relevant later - when a traditional exorcism fails, Abby successfully turns it into a "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight by singing her version of the song:
  Freedom people marching down the street
  Stallone time just walking in the street
  They won't go where they don't know
  But they're walking in line
  We got the beat!
  We got the beat!
• My Weird School:
  • In one book, Emily sings "Home on the Range", only she says "cantaloupe" rather than "antelope" during the "Where the deer and the antelope play" line. AJ teases her for it and she starts wailing.
  • In "Mrs. Kormel is Not Normal", the kids hear that they're going to have a new kid, and they mishear "new" as "nude". As such, they think that the new student Neil is a nudist. Even after they learn that he's not naked after all, they continue calling Neil "the nude kid" as an inside joke.
• New Moan: Teddy recites a poem for Heffa that ends with the line "My love always, even when you're eighty." Heffa is touched by the sentiment but, when she calls him on saying it later, he replies that he actually said eighteen, and is in fact repulsed by the prospect of being with Heffa when she's eighty.
• Noble Warriors: In Seeker, someone delivers a partial warning "Whatever you do, don't", but the remaining words become mangled by distance into "enemy orb ladder" ? the full message being "Whatever you do, don't empty your bladder!"
• Nursery Crime: Jack's teen son Ben keeps adopting elaborate, literature-based courtship rituals based on mishearings of his love interest's words. He hears "I love kids" as "I love Keats", and "I'm looking forward to Lawrence's turn [to buy something from the shops]" as "looking forward to Lawrence Stern" and repeatedly makes misguided wooing attempts based around references to those writers.
• Olive The Other Reindeer: The title is based on a mishearing of "All of the Other Reindeer".
• The Prisoner Of Pineapple Place, set in an invisible alley of invisible residents, has the protagonist believe the words of the Pledge are "One nation, invisible, with liberty and justice for all". The story suggests this might be an intentional example on the teacher's part, given the residents' own invisibility.
• Pyramids: An attempt by the mummies to translate the ancient hieroglyphs on the first pyramid via Chinese Whispers initially results in "and Khuft said unto the First" being heard as "Handcuffed to the bed, the aunt thirsted".
• Ramona Quimby:
  • In Ramona the Pest, which takes place when Ramona's in kindergarten, Ramona mistakes the lyrics "the dawn's early light" (in "The Star-Spangled Banner") for "the dawnzer's lee light" and comes to the conclusion that "dawnzer" means "lamp". This leads to humiliation one evening when, proud of having sussed out a new vocabulary word and trying to show off her knowledge, she confidently suggests turning on "the dawnzer", even adding, when questioned, "It gives off a lee light!"
  • Ramona herself is also misunderstood by others in her kindergarten incarnation. "I'd like to make Q's." "Make use of what?" She then wonders what kind of grown-up doesn't know what the letter "Q" is. (The substitute, obviously, because substitutes are stupid — so Ramona thinks at that age.)
  • Ramona Forever has a minor example, with Ramona referring to Saudi Arabia as "Gaudy Arabia".
• Ready Player Two: Shoto mishears Prince's "Little Red Corvette" as "Living Correct". Aech gives him grief over it.
• Revenge of the Sith: In the novelization, when the newly-minted Vader comes to execute the Separatist leaders, Nut Gunray frantically protests that Palpatine promised to leave them in peace. Vader replies that, as it happens, the transmission was garbled, and Palpatine promised to leave them in pieces.
• Shadows of the Workhouse by Jennifer Worth (the author of Call the Midwife) includes the story of Jane who, as a child growing up in a workhouse, innocently claimed Sir Ian Astor-Smallie, one of the workhouse's wealthy benefactors, as her "daddy". This did not go down well with the workhouse staff, who ordered her to repeat the words "Sir Ian Astor-Smallie is not my father." But Jane misheard his name as "See A Nasty Smelly" and, when she said those words, got into even more trouble. The workhouse staff (who already had her pegged as a trouble-maker) clamped down extra hard on her after this, subjecting her to several humiliating punishments until she lost her spirit and became totally withdrawn. However, she did find happiness later in life. ^note The Jane who appears in season 2 of the TV series is based on her, but was raised in an institution rather than a workhouse.
• The Silver Chair: Owing to being hard of hearing without his Ear Trumpet, Trumpkin at first mishears "The girl's called Jill" as "The girls are all killed". He also mistakes "Eustace" for "Useless".
• Snot Stew: An in-universe mondegreen names the book, which comes from the kitten protagonists mishearing the human children arguing: "Is not!" "Is too!" becomes "S'not!" "S'tew!"
• Something Might Happen: At one point, some of Twitchly's friends come by to invite him to a party, which will have balloons. Twitchly mishears this as "baboons" and thinks it's too scary to come.
• Stanley Bagshaw And The Twenty Two Ton Whale: Overlapping with Funny Phone Misunderstanding. Somebody tries to phone someone else about a whale turning around in the boatyard, but he believes she said the canal was on fire, due to mishearing "amazing" as "a'blazing", "whale" as "bail", and "turning around" as "burning down".
• Take Me Out Of The Bathtub And Other Silly Dilly Songs written by Alan Katz and illustrated by David Catrow and a number of other picture books from the same series are entire picture books based around this concept, filled with songs whose lyrics are mondegreens of real-life songs. (The title of the original comes from "Take Me Out to the Ballgame.")
• The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles: Tebow mishears "CN Tower" as "Seein' Tower". When a waiter tries to make that very pun, Tebow unwittingly spoils the joke.
• In Edward Ormondroyd's Time at the Top Susan comments that Victoria's mother is "as beautiful as a movie star". Victoria mishears this as "moving star" and states that it's so poetic that she's going to write it in her diary.
• Warrior Cats: In Crookedstar's Promise, the barn cat Fleck thinks that the Moonstone (a place where warriors communicate with their ancestors) is the "Foodstone". Prompts the hilarious line "Is there a Foodstone as well as a Moonstone?"
• Winnie the Pooh: The "Out and About With Pooh" storybook "The Honey Cake Mix-Up" revolves around Pooh and Roo trying to bake a birthday cake for Kanga; however, Pooh mishears the flour ingredient as "flower", and the two literally try to put flowers in the cake which makes it come out wrong.
• The Whicharts: The children's name comes from a mondegreen of the Lord's Prayer: Our Father, Whichart in Heaven. Since they are illegitimate, they assume this means their father's name is Whichart, and take it as their own.
• A short story by Aleksandr Shibaev demonstrates several instances of this in Russian (note that, while the dialogue is spoken between two school children, the only difference between the phrases are how the letters are divided into words):
  • Nesu raznye veshchi (I' m carrying various things) and nesuraznye veschi (absurd things).
  • Nesu mel (I'm carrying chalk) and ne sumel (didn't manage to).
  • Emu zhe nado budet (he is going to need this) and emu zhena dobudet (his wife will get it for him)
  • Finally ta marka (that stamp), tam arka (there's an arch) and Tamarka (a girl named Tamara).

Lie, at Shantae's Wee (Live-Action TV)

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: In "Beginning of the End", the Clairvoyant's Übermensch ideas came about primarily because he misheard a speech by Nick Fury about how one can accomplish anything once he realizes he can become part of something bigger and didn't catch the "a part of" segment, and built a whole transhumanist philosophy out of this mistake.
  The Clairvoyant: You remember that speech you used to give us, Nick? About how one man can accomplish anything once he realizes he can become something bigger? Well, now I am.
  Fury: ...A part. A part of something bigger.
  The Clairvoyant: Is that how it went?
  Coulson: Not a great listener.
  Fury: If you tell me this whole HYDRA path thing you took is because you misheard my damn "One Man" speech...
  The Clairvoyant: [ranting] I am the key to the future of the universe. I'm the origin of all things—
  Fury: [ignores him, turns to Coulson] You got it, right?
  Coulson: Totally.
• A.N.T. Farm: Chyna once posted a video of herself holding a soccer ball and singing randomly "tonight I'm a soccer ball". A record label producer saw the video and assumed the lyrics were "tonight I'm unstoppable". She didn't bother to correct him as obviously that sounds like a more sensible thing to have said so she just rolls with it.
• BattleBots: In the revival, one bot driver gives a very enthusiastic and inarticulate battle cry before his bout starts. The subtitle guy doesn't even try to guess what the hell he said: "????????!!!"
• Boston Common: One episode has two characters arguing over the lyrics to Down Under. You really couldn't blame them for not knowing what vegemite was, though.
• The Break With Michelle Wolf: In 2018, when it was revealed that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency or ICE was separating illegal immigrants' children into prison camps, Wolf savaged the organization with a satirical ad, "ICE is...", in which ICE members were completing the sentence with statements like "ICE is... protecting the homeland from the enemy", drawing an obvious parallel to the Middle Eastern terrorist group ISIS.
• Comedy Inc has fun with this trope in their stop-motion vignette series Ernest the Engine and Others where the character Stevie the Steam Train tends to "stutter badly at the most inappropriate of times", such as when he sings the song "Country Roads".
• Dharma & Greg: Greg has a habit of this. "I want to Rock and Roll all night... And part of every day!" Dharma tries to correct him ("...Party every day"), and he drunkenly replies, "If you party every day, how can you get enough rest to Rock and Roll the next night?"
• Fawlty Towers: Twice in "The Kipper and the Corpse", Polly claims to have misheard something, to cover up the death of Mr Leeman.
  Polly: When he said Mr Leeman was dead, I thought he said "he's still in bed".
  (Later)
  Guest: We've come to collect Mr Leeman, and take him to a meeting.
  Basil: Oh I see, Mr Leeman!
  Polly: We thought you said the linen.
  Basil: (to himself, a little too loudly) Brilliant!
• Friends: A butchering of "Hold me closer, tiny dancer" by Elton John is referenced in an episode wherein Phoebe is convinced that "Hold me close, young Tony Danza" is the actual line.
• Glee: When stars Lea Michele and Idina Menzel sang a duet of Lady Gaga's "Poker Face." The correct lyric is "She's got me like nobody", but it's often heard as "She's got to love nobody." Michele and Menzel's cover included the Mondegreen instead of the correct lyrics.
• Hawaii Five-0: In "Ua Helele'i Ka Hoku", Jane Miller always thought a line of Freelance Riot's song "Sweet Disaster" was "Playing love songs to strangers / And drinking Hartigan." while it actually is "Playing love songs to strangers / And breaking hearts again.".
• In episode 13 of Hell's Kitchen season 15, one of the chefs and their father is presenting a dish to Chef Ramsay for a challenge and the chef's father mentions he owns other restaurants. When asked what was their favorite, they both mention the "Funky Monkey". Because of how fast they said it, Ramsay repeats, confused, "fuck me what?"
• Heute Show: Enforced. Pussy Riot was all over the headlines at the time, and the moderator rhetorically asked what a pussy is. Cut to a Bavarian politican, talking about some "Parteivorsitzender" (party chairman). Due to his Bavarian and his mumbling, and the set-up, it invariably mondegreened to "Parteifotze". Luckily, as mentioned elsewhere, in Bavaria the word doesn't mean pussy anyway...
• Hey Vern, It's Ernest!: Every single episode has a sketch where Ernest went to his barber and asked him to give him a haircut that made him look like a Wall Street tycoon. The barber always mishears the instruction as something that rhymed which was thematically related to what the episode was about ("I thought you said The Man in the Moon" or "I thought you said a wind-blown sand dune" or something). "Holidays" has Ernest setting out to celebrate all the holidays of the year in one day, starting with New Year:
  Ernest: (singing) Should old maintenance be real hot, and never hard to find...
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • In 4th episode of season 4 "Intervention" Barney spent far too much time playing an old man as a part his latest play, so in The Tag of the episode we see rest of the gang staging an intervention.
    Robin: Barney, this is an intervention
    Barney: I'm sorry! I can't hear you!
    Marshall: Alright. Enough with the old man bit!
    Barney: What about the old sand pit?
    Lily: Let it go!
    Barney: Let it snow? I love that old diddy.
    Ted: I'm getting my flail.
    Barney: You're setting sail?
  • In the Season 9 episode "Last Time in New York", Lily finds Ted and Marshall's swords after she thought Marshall got rid of them due to the incident in the Season 1 episode "The Duel" where Marshall accidentally stabbed Lily on the shoulder. While she and Robin are wondering why the guys are into these swords, they begin to duel with Lily misquoting the infamous quote from Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride. Future Ted lampshades this.
  Lily: My name is Rodrigo De Goya! You killed someone I love! Prepare...to dance!
  Future Ted: Yes, kids. That's actually what your Aunt Lily thought the line was.
• iCarly:
  • "iGot Detention": Subverted. After a teacher holding Carly, Sam, and a whole class in evening detention says that the school's principal is a "weak spineless fool", secretly on camera as the Principal is watching online, the teacher tries to cover it by saying he misheard and what he actually said was "sleek, stylish, cool!"
  • "iStakeout": Played straight. The detectives who infiltrate the Shay's apartment to spy on the convenience store next door believe the owner is selling "pirated" movies, which are illegal copies. As it turns out, he's really selling pirate movies, poorly homemade movies about pirates which are not illegal at all.
• Electric Light Orchestra's "Don't Bring Me Down" is referenced in VH-1's "I Love The 70s Volume 2". The made up word, "groose" is often mistaken for "Bruce".
  "I just want to know who Bruce is."
• In the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode "The Nightman Cometh", the gang puts on a play, and Frank's character has to sing the line "you gotta pay the troll toll to get up in that boy's soul". However, his thick New Jersey accent results in it sounding a lot more like "boy's hole." Consequently, everyone involved in the play except Charlie is convinced that Frank's character, rather than selling the Little Boy's soul, is actually selling him off for sex.
• Jimmy Kimmel Live!: A segment has a man reviewing Beauty and the Beast, but he keeps mondegreening the film's name, as well as the names of some of the actors in the movie.
• Judge Judy once heard a case brought by a young woman who was suing her ex-boyfriend for assault in a situation instigated by some DVDs of hers the boyfriend had neglected to return. One of those DVDs was the movie Next Friday. Due to the plaintiff's poor diction, Judge Judy heard the phrase "Next Friday movie" as "X-rated movie."
• Just Shoot Me!: In one episode, Nina and Elliott get into an argument about whether the lyrics of their favourite blues song are "Stone for my pillow" (because the singer is sleeping in the street) or "Slow, foamy killer" (referring to malt liquor). They call the singer's widow, who tells them that it is "Stone cold armadillo", but it was actually Finch messing with them.
• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver once ran an "And Now... This" montage documenting news anchors saying "mask debate," which sounds like "masturbate."
• Mock the Week: On a Christmas episode, Adam Hills tells a story about his grandmother: when Deck the Halls was announced as the next song coming up on some tv special, she claims she'd never heard of it. When the rest of the family started saying she must know it, she snapped, "I've never sung Dick the Horse!"
• M*A*S*H: At the end of "Mr. And Mrs. Who?," a ceremony to dissolve an ersatz marriage between Charles and a lady he met in Tokyo, Donna Marie Parker, is held.
  Hawkeye: (to Father Mulcahy) Father, I realize that this ceremony doesn't fall within the basic tenets of your religion...
  Col. Potter: (a bit tipsy) I didn't know tennis was a religion.
• Match Game: In one episode, a contestant in the Bonus Round invoked this when given the phrase "Cuckoo ____". Asked to fill in the blank, she replied with "Cuckoo, friend, and Ollie", a mangling of the classic puppet show ''Kukla, Fran, and Ollie".
• Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit from Nevermind. When MTV aired the music video, they subtitled lyrics into the video.(Unfortunately, even MTV got the lyrics wrong. It's no wonder why "Weird Al" Yankovic's parody pokes fun at the fact the lyrics are nigh-impossible to understand.)
• Never Mind the Buzzcocks: A game called "Indecipherable Lyrics" is based on the teams trying to deliberately come up with entire verses' worth of mondegreens for particularly mumbled songs. See also Something Something Leonard Bernstein and Perishing Alt-Rock Voice (the latter a common cause of Mondegreens.
• Dicky Harper from Nicky, Ricky, Dicky, and Dawn is prone to this. He mispronounces Valentine's Day as "Valentime's Day", "the time when that guy Valen shoots people with his bone and marrow". He also mishears "molecular gastronomy" as "muscular astronomy".
• Our Miss Brooks: Often the baliwick of Dumb Jock Stretch Snodgrass. In "Spare That Rod!" (a Sound-to-Screen Adaptation of "Letter from the Education Board"), Stretch tells Miss Brooks that the Harriet had given him a "mee-mo" to go to the supply room to take "in-vent-ory".
  Stretch Snodgrass: I'm in a real jam, Miss Brooks. I can't find no in-vent-ory no place!"
• Red Dwarf: According to "Timewave", Rimmer once misheard his brothers telling him about the "clitoris" for "spit on her wrist". He blames this mishearing for his sex life being a shambles.
• Six Feet Under: In-Universe pop-star Celeste's song Set My Loving Free is sung by Keith as Shave My Legs For Free.
• So You Think You Can Dance: During an audition featuring a traditional Mongolian dancer, the dancer describes that the dance she's doing is traditionally performed while holding a bowl of horse milk. Unfortunately, her English isn't that great, so her accent turns it into "whore's milk" instead. The confusion takes a moment to clear.
• Saturday Night Live "Weekend Update"
  • Emily Latalla's schtick was complaining about thing she has misheard: "What is all this fuss I hear about the Supreme Court decision on a "deaf" penalty? It's terrible! Deaf people have enough problems as it is!" When corrected, she'd give an apologetic "never mind."
  • Anthony Crispino's "Second Hand News" would repeat to Seth Meyers stuff he "heard about." Unlike Emily, when corrected he gets defensive, saying that Seth has it wrong.
    Anthony: Did you hear about this TV star whose show got cancelled because he went crazy and did a bunch of cocaine?! This Charlie Rose?
    Seth: NO!! That was Charlie Sheen!
    Anthony: Nah, I'm pretty sure it was Charlie Rose, Seth! They cancelled his show — "Two Men, a Girl, and Half a Pizza Place"! And now — NOW! — he's been sending out messages via Twizzlers.
    Seth: NO!!
    Anthony: Yeah! Yeah, he sent out like a MILLION Twizzlers! There's candy everywhere!
• Spicks and Specks: From an anecdote told by Colin Hay of the band Men at Work, one time, during a live performance, an audience member called out "Sing the song about the goats, mate!" Naturally, Hay was confused, but eventually realised that the audience member meant the song "Overkill". The chorus goes: "Day after day it reappears / Night after night my heartbeat shows the fear / Ghosts appear and fade away..."
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: One affiliate airing somehow captions "All hands on deck for saucer separation" as "All hands on deck for happy birthday" in one of the episodes.
• Small Steps: Armpit mishears the words "I'm but" as "Armpit".
• One of Jimmy Fallon's "Late Night Hashtags" routines had examples sent in by fans via Twitter.
• The Two Ronnies were very fond of this trope, often basing entire sketches around it.
  • Don't Quote Me used a parodied Shakespearean play to show how many contemporary TV programmes were supposedly named after the Bard's quotes, such as "can he every it show?" ^note Kenny Everett show and "My coronation's treat"^note Coronation Street
  • Four Candles has a hardware store worker Mondegreening a customer's entire shipping list, form the titular four candles^note fork handles to the billhooks.
  • Tickle your botty with a feather tonight^note Particularly grotty weather tonight plays with this trope in universe: a pub visitor keeps making rude comments to strangers, each time substituting an innocent homophonic phrase when they ask what he said.
• At least two experiments on German TV showed the gullibility of the "I want to believe" personality type. The first (1970s or so) was more unintentional, it was the good old Set-Radio-To-Static-Tape-It-And-Hear-The-Ghosts-Talk setup. After much mumbo-jumbo mondegreened together, one ancient troper later identified the taped stuff as coming from "Sugar Me" by Lynsey De Paul. Hilarity ensued. The second was intentional and even more egregious, as science TV Show "Quarks&Co" used a snippet from "Another Brick In The Wall" and claimed someone is saying "Hol ihn, hol ihn unters Dach!", accompanied with some impromptu horror story. In the meantime it turned into an urban legend.
• V1983: "Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly" was mondegreened by Willie as thus:
  Willie: Deck the halls with lousy folly/Fa la la la la, la la la la/Tis the evening scruffy molly/Fa la la la la, la la la la/Don't we know how gay a carol/Fa la la, la la la, la la la/Holy moly Yule Tide carol/Fa la la la la, la la?
• Victorious: The main character mistook the The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song lyric "shooting some b-ball outside the school" as "chewing some meatballs outside the school."
• The Walking Dead:
  • Rick often pronounces his son Carl's name in such a way that it sounds more like "Coral" instead.
  • The Clutch song The Regulator has the lyric "I see a lantern burning" misheard by fans as "I see Atlanta burning". So did the producers, who use the song in an episode.
• What We Do In The Shadows: The episode "Local News" begins with a burst water main in the middle of the vampires' Staten Island neighborhood and Nandor is interviewed as an eyewitness to the break on the local news. When asked for his name, Nandor blurts out his archaic warrior epithet, "the Relentless", but the reporter mishears him and he is instead captioned as "Nandor De Laurentiis". Unfortunately this is far from the only Masquerade-breaking secret he lets slip on camera, setting up the episode's plot.
• Whose Line Is It Anyway?: Greg Proops confuses the title of Sir Mix-a-lot's "Baby got back" with "Ladies got back".
• Wings: One episode's subplot revolved around Antonio becoming a busker in the airport, singing a song he learned back in Italy (his introduction to English): "My Goat Knows the Bowling Score, Hallelujah." After everyone gets sick of him singing the same line over and over they suggest he go on to the next verse, which he does: "Sid's new hair is in the mail, Hallelujah." (That is, "Michael, row the boat ashore" and "Sister, help to trim the sail", respectively.)
• WKRP in Cincinnati: Inverted with the credits song. For years fans of the show have attempted to translate what the garbled lyrics are... finally decades later, the producers admitted there ARE no lyrics. The musician sang gibberish as a placeholder and was going to put in real lyrics later; the producers liked the gibberish version so much though that they told him not to bother and used it.
• You Can't Do That on Television: In an episode dealing with politics, Alasdair uses the word "slimy" as an adjective to describe modern-day politicians. Justin then dumps a bucket of green slime over Alasdair's head.
  Alasdair: I said "slimy", not "slime me", you idiot!

Maggot's In (Magazines)

• A 1997 article in Billboard magazine discusses several mondegreens that Country Music radio program directors have heard from callers. Among them:
  • David Lee Murphy's "Dust on the Bottle" being misheard as "Dust on the Bible"
  • Ty England's "Should've Asked Her Faster" being misheard as "Should've Slapped the Bastard"
  • The line "Let's all go down to Dumas Walker" from The Kentucky Headhunters' "Dumas Walker" being misheard as "?go down to do Miss Walker"
  • Billy Ray Cyrus' "Some Gave All" being misheard as "Some Gay Ball"
• MAD had a feature showing how kids interpreted various patriotic songs, such as "The Star Spangled Banner", "My Country Tis of Thee", "The Battle Hymn of the Marines", and "America the Beautiful". For example, the last lines of "The Star Strangled Grandma" are as follows.
  Oh say does that star-strangled
  Grandma smell Dave.
  For the mandolin is free
  and our home is a cave.
• There was an article in a 1980s Reader's Digest edition in which the author recounted how, as a child, she thought that the first line went of The Star-Spangled Banner, "O say can you see, by the daunserly light" and kept "daunserly" as her secret, magical word. She was eventually corrected on this by her family when she decided that it couldn't hurt to share that magical word with her sister who, of course, initially had no idea what she was referring to.

Mew's Sick (Music)

• In a version of the Christmas song "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" sung by John Denver and The Muppets, Miss Piggy ends up interrupting the song when Gonzo sings "Now give us some figgy pudding", thinking he said "piggy pudding". He has to explain that he said figgy as the pudding is made of figs though, in annoyance, he mutters "and bacon".
• Richie Kavanagh: "Chicken Talk" is about a boy learning a naughty word from hearing a chicken's clucks as F-bombs.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic: Done in the song "Trapped in the Drive-thru". And given it's a parody of the overblown "Trapped in the Closet", a simple mishearing is extended to a whole verse:
  I hopped up and said, "I don't know, do you want to get something delivered?"
  And she's like, "Why would I want to eat liver?
  I don't even like liver."
  I'm like, "No, I said 'delivered'."
  She's like, "I heard you say liver."
  I'm like, "I should know what I said."
  ''She's like, "Whatever... I just don't want any liver."
• The White Stripes: The title of "Seven Nation Army" is based on a non-musical mondegreen. Jack White stated that as a boy, he thought the Salvation Army's name was "Seven-Nation Army" and decided to call the song that.
• When Dexys Midnight Runners performed "Jackie Wilson Said" on Top of the Pops in 1982, they had a huge photo of darts player Jocky Wilson displayed behind them. This had been an intentional joke by the band, but audiences assumed the BBC had done it by mistake, and Dexys were not asked to perform on TOTP again.
• Invoked. Good Kid asked four people off the street to guess the lyrics to their song "Witches".
  Song: A narrative waste of patches and light
  Woman: A narrative ways to something alright?
• They Might Be Giants' "Broke In Two":
  You said "I'm gonna run you down"
  I heard "I'm an orangutan"
• Steve Miller Band uses the word "pompatus", which isn’t a word, most famously in "The Joker". According to The Other Wiki, it’s a Mondegreen of "puppetutes" from the 1954 song "The Letter", by Vernon Green and The Medallions.
• In the video for Peter Schilling's "Major Tom (Coming Home)", the phrase "floating weightless" is interpreted as "floating waitress" as we see a bunch of roller-skating carhop waitresses circling around over a fog-covered floor near the end.
• When The Mr. T Experience contributed a Cover Version of R.E.M.'s "Can't Get There From Here" to a tribute album, there was no official lyric sheet to the song, so whenever there was a line the band couldn't make out, they picked the most ridiculous mondedgreen they could think of as an alternative - for example "Donna Reed is not my mom" instead of "Brother Ray can sing my song".

Pod Crust (Podcasts)

• RiffTrax:
  • In the RiffTrax for New Moon, the commentators joke that one of the songs on the soundtrack seems to say "Armed with your staring fly." The song is Roslyn by bon Iver and St. Vincent and the real words are "Aren't we just terrified?"
  • In the RiffTrax for Star Trek: Generations, Kevin makes this something of a Running Gag concerning Patrick Stewart's accent. When Picard tells Kirk that they have to stop the missile launcher for firing the warhead, Kevin grips "There's no time to be sitting in a lawnchair!" And when Picard requests for the ship Farragut to transport him and Riker up, Kevin utters "What did he just call that guy?"

Prod Fission, All Resting (Professional Wrestling)

• On an episode of WCW Thunder in 1998, the crowd is heard chanting "Hogan sucks! Hogan sucks!" This prompts commentator Bobby Heenan to ask, "What are they saying, Hogan plays for the Sox?"

Pop, It Shows (Puppet Shows)

• Muppets Tonight: A sketch with Kermit the Frog and Sandra Bullock references that the title lyric of the nonsense song "Mah Na Mah Na" sounds like the word "phenomena".
• Mystery Science Theater 3000:
  • Pod People: The crew has fun with deliberately misrepeating the movie's lines. "Idiot control now! Bees on pot! Burning rubber tires!" The funny thing is some of the ridiculous lines Joel and the bots sang are the real lines. Also, one must remember this is a dub of a Spanish movie so it's bound to have major issues. ^note  What's even funnier about Idiot Control Now is that no two sets of lyrics written out by fans is the same.
  • Santa Claus Conquers the Martians: The last host segment has Joel and the Bots singing a fractured version of "Angels We Have Heard on High"
    'Angels we have heard are high
    Softly sipping old champagne
    Oh-ooooh-ooooh-Ooooreos
    Inexpensive da-a-nish!
  • The Girl in Lover's Lane: While viewing the movie, the crew hear Bix Dugan as "Big Stupid," and continue to call him that for the whole movie.
  • The Painted Hills: While reading the end credits for the movie, Joel and the Bots are surprised to learn that the character whose name they heard as "Pile-on Pete" was actually "Pilot Pete".
  • Last of the Wild Horses: Mike and the Bots mishear character Charlie Cooper's name as "Johnny Pooper", leading to a stream of Toilet Humor jokes.
  • Red Zone Cuba:
    • Servo mishears part of the movie's Title Theme Tune as "Mundo Penis".
    • Both robots mishear Chastain's name as "Justine".
    • Crow mishears "his grandparent meant so much to him" as his "green pants".
  • Prince of Space: When the Phantom Dictator of Krankor introduces himself, Crow utters out a confused ”Crank-Whore?”
  • Invasion of the Neptune Men: "Rojium-Tanium" is misheard as "Roji-Panty Complex". It was ridiculous enough that it turned into the subject of a host segment in which Tom Servo contracted Roji-Panty Complex and Mike had to take care of him by administering panties every hour.
  • Overdrawn at the Memory Bank: Fingal asks a computer-generated ghost of his mother, "Am I nuts?", which it comes out as "'M I nuts?", leading the crew to think he's asking something about "my nuts."
  • Diabolik has a line being sung by a woman, which Mike interpenetrates as "'Keep my potty down'? Women and their toilet seat issues!"
  • In the revival's Christmas episode "The Christmas That Almost Wasn't", Jonah tries carolling with the bots, but the song he tries to sing is "Good King Wencelas", "the one Christmas song no one knows the lyrics to."
    Jonah: Good King Wenceslas looked out on the Feast of Stephen.
    Servo: And the... Christmas guys... did shout...
    Crow: ...at the... Justin Bieber.
• Sesame Street:
  • In one episode, Cyranose de Bergerac has a cold which is affecting his hearing. As such, when Oscar tells him he has a cold in his nose (hoping to make him angry since hearing the word "nose" is Cyranose's Berserk Button), Cyranose mishears "nose" as "toes" and "clothes".
  • In Sink or Float?, a Licensed Game for Sesame Street, a little girl named Emma and Cookie Monster are seeing which objects sink in water and which float. Emma tells the player to make a "hypothesis", i.e. guess which items will do what, but Cookie Monster mishears and asks how a hippopotamus would fit in the tank.

Raid the Woo (Radio)

• A listener jokingly wrote into the Ken Bruce show on BBC Radio 2 to ask why Harry Styles was singing "What? I'm Alan Sugar. Hi!" For the rest of the time "Watermelon Sugar" was in the regular playlist, that's what Bruce called it.
• Cabin Pressure has Arthur sing "Get dressed you merry gentlemen" in the Christmas Episode with everyone immediately questioning him. As per usual him being The Ditz, he's surprised to find out it's actually "God rest you merry gentlemen".
• Terry Wogan was once utterly perplexed by a listener's request for Wogan to play the song about Mulligan's Tyre on his radio show. Neither he nor the production staff could work it out. Intrigued, Wogan contacted the listener and asked. After listening to the fan hum a few bars and say "You know. The one with the bagpipes", the mystery became clear. Terry Wogan was then more than pleased to play Paul McCartney and Wings performing Mull of Kintyre.
• A caller to a Dominican radio station wanted to hear " the song that goes Reebok or the Nikes" which puzzled the DJ's for a minute until they realized he meant "Rythym of the Night" by Corona.

Rolled Plate (Roleplay)

• The Gamer's Alliance: Rimnerian Songs, named after Craig Rimner who first introduced them to the world, are twisted versions of the songs they are based on and which tend to have naughty or downright incomprehensible lyrics based on the lyrics of the original songs.

Take Ball Tuff Came (Tabletop Games)

• Warhammer Fantasy: The Fighting Cocks' battle cry of "Hurray, Hurray! The Moot, the Moot!" actually stems from a battle where they were on the losing side, so their panicking leader yelled for them to retreat — specifically, he shouted "Run away! Run away! To the Moot! To the Moot!" But in the chaos of the battle, the Fighting Cocks misheard him and, emboldened by what they believed to be a patriotic battle cry, took it up and made an unexpected heroic charge into enemy ranks, which turned the tide and achieved victory for their employers.

The Aether (Theatre)

• Hamilton: "Burr, you disgust me!" "Ah, so you've discussed me."
• In a theatrical parody called Rudolph the Red-Hosed Reindeer about a crossdressing/gay reindeer, the Snowman-narrator sings a song about a woman named "Sylvia Gould" until the Lumberjack corrects him that it's supposed to be "Silver and Gold."
• In Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by Richard Wagner, Beckmesser, having obtained the words to Walther's song "Die seligen Morgentraum-Deutweise" as well as the first spot in the singing contest, proceeds to sing a completely butchered version of the song. It doesn't help that he makes up his own tune, but he also barely understands the words he's singing and gets a good number of them hilariously wrong, turning Walther's dignified poetic imagery into embarrassing nonsense. Unsurprisingly, the crowd greets the end of his performance with derisive laughter rather than applause.

Deemed Porks (Theme Parks)

• At Universal Studios:
  • Cosmo in Jimmy Neutron's Nicktoon Blast hears "help us" as "Elvis" and "achin' head" as "bacon head".
  • In The Simpsons Ride, Sideshow Bob says, "You've foiled my plans for the last time!" Bart hears it as, "You soiled your pants for the last time?"

We Did All Games (Video Games)

• Ace Attorney: Mondegreens are a common source of contradictions. Whether they're played straight or subverted depend on the case.
  • A plot point in case 3-5 is that Pearl misread 'gravely' as 'gravy', which resulted in her throwing gravy over a scroll. Figuring this out is key to getting her to confess that she tried to channel Dahlia Hawthorne at her mother's request; the request letter ended with the sentence "gravely roast the Master in the fires of Hades", which she thought meant gravy from their roast dinner and a scroll depicting the Master.
  • One piece of evidence in case 5-3 is a poor-quality recording of a woman saying "You're a goner." Athena points out that one of the witnesses is named Hugh O'Connor, meaning that the woman could be talking about him. She isn't; it's 'you're a goner'.
• Armed and Dangerous: One cutscene involves a man with a gun demanding Roman, Q, Jonesy, and Rexus give him the Keys of Zardos. However, because of the man's accent, Rexus thinks he's asking them to give him a kiss, which Rexus does.
• Chrono Trigger: A chef in the middle ages is frustrated by his time-traveling guest's request for "eyes cream." May be a Justified Trope, since it's implied the dish the guest intended to order hasn't been invented yet.
• Cragne Manor: Carol, being a young child, is unable to pronounce "chrysanthemum tea". She calls it "crisp hand sew mom", and Naomi corrects her.
• Crypt of the NecroDancer: In one of the story mode cutscenes, a flashback has Cadence wondering why her father and her uncle thought some "gold 'n loot" was so important. The "gold 'n loot" actually turns out to be the Golden Lute, the game's resident Magnetic Plot Device.
• Five Nights at Fuckboy's 3: In the end of the Act 1, when Springtrap is about to dramatically enter the office, he can talk to Phantom B.B. before entering. Phantom B.B. tells Springtrap that he knows what to do (referring to their plan to revive B.B.), referring to him as "lapine man". Springtrap responds in annoyance that he's not a pine, prompting Phantom B.B. to tell him to fuck off in rage.
• In Homescapes Austin sings a bit of "Here Comes the Sun", turning "Here comes the sun, and I say it's alright" into "Here comes the sun, and I say it's the light".
• Just Dance: The Jamiroquai song "Automaton" has a "Tomato Version" routine as a nod to how the line "I'm automaton" can be misheard as "I'm a tomato".
• The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night: The Assassin is an elite Ape soldier who wears a heavy helmet, which muffles his speech and makes him rather hard to understand. At several points in the game, his attempts at dramatic speeches, threats and Badass Boasts are undercut by the fact that Spyro and Sparx can't actually understand him and stop paying attention to argue over what he's saying.
  Assassin: Mwahahahaha! Time to feel some pain!
  Sparx: Ahhhh! He's going to steal my brain!
  Spyro: Actually, he said it's time for pain.
  Sparx: Really? Whew! [pats his own head] For a second there I thought I lost you, buddy.
• In Princess X, a Cute Monster Girl-themed eroge, the demon princess Naja reads in a magazine that the way to win any man's heart is Through His Stomach, and attempts to endear herself to the protagonist by preparing the dish rumoured to win over even the most recalcitrant man. Unfortunately, she can't read Japanese that well, so instead of preparing nikujaga, a traditional dish of meat and potatoes, she brings in a nikujaguar, a large, green multi-tentacled monster with the roaring head of a big cat. It manages to eat her Beleaguered Assistant alive while Naja is distracted trying to peel the onions (a task she struggles at because no matter how many layers she peels off, there's always another one).
• Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth: A Running Gag is Rei mishearing peoples' sentences to involve food. For example, in the Group Date Cafe, Teddie briefly mentions "love talk". Rei hears this as "loaf talk", questioning if he'll taste delicious after being baked.
• In Star Wars: The Old Republic, Doctor Misar thanks a Jedi Player Character by trying to quote the Jedi catchphrase ("May the Force be with you"), which he has misheard as "May the floor be with you."
• Tak 2: The Staff of Dreams: Tak encounters the Giant Misunderstanding Juju, who mishears everything Tak says.
• Yooka-Laylee: I.N.E.P.T., the security guard of Capital Cashino, has poor hearing, which results in him mishearing the statements said to him as insults. Such is the case when Yooka adviced him to calm down and log off, which I.N.E.P.T. misheard as Yooka telling him to bog off, offending him and kickstarting a boss fight. Later on, when Kartos taunts him by claiming that's he's the track king, I.N.E.P.T. mishears it as him insulting his tracking, making him retaliate with missiles.

Weapons, New Mason (Web Animation)

• Many Animutations tend to run on mondegreens to fuel its weird and trippy imagery. See page for examples.
• The Spiritual Successor to Animutations, Buffalaxes (named for said youtuber, Buffalax, who created the genre), also runs on this, albeit usually without the trippy imagery. Unlike animutations, buffalaxes usually shun trippy imagery for the original music video. It's humor comes from the over-the-top offensive and expletive-laden mondegreens. Simply put, while the goal of an animutation artist is to make surreal imagery to go with a mondegreen of the song, the goal of a buffalaxer is to mondegreen the song with lyrics that are as offensive as possible. For example:
  • The Indian song Tunak Tunak Tun with English words that sounded like the original Punjabi lyrics. The results are hysterical. "In your yard I am teh Ferengi man, very odd and chunky!"
  • Moskau! Moskau! Moskau! Billy is a handyman! Porcelain is the surest plan. Hohohohoho...hey! Moskau! Moskau! Dinah Steeler is too loose. Castro it's the time to lose. Hohohohoho!
  • In the same vein as Moskau: Ching! Ching! Dschingis Khan! He liked the ho but then he liked the Hindu better!
  • Kinky Tom! Kinky Tom! Here I sell the dog!.
  • But sit and fart in the duck
  • Gosh, my old calculator ain't got no bow! Nipply man I met, he ate my motorboat!
  • My loony bun is fine, Benny Lava!
  • And lastly, the evergreen Saint Sea Hat! Jew made you a beaten man!
• Colin Mochrie vs. Jesus H. Christ provides misheard English sing-along lyrics for its three non-English songs. They get more plot-important as the videos progress. The first video, "French Erotic Film", only has a reference to "an old blue Scot called Dill" to connect to Colin becoming a Scotsman. "Plan 9 from Underpants" has mondegreens with references to Colin and Andrew Kepple (the creator of the trilogy). By "Conquest of Animutopia", plot-important mondegreens are the norm and ones that sound like non-sequiturs happen less than half the time.
  May Colin be defeated,
  may Colin leave, or are
  we wrong, Canadian leader?
  You're Pokémon!
• Mentioned in one segment of The Fingertips Project (a music video for "Fingertips" by They Might Be Giants done by members of the Animutation community); during the segment for "I Don't Understand You", mondegreens from "The Bonny Earl O' Murray" (the Trope Namer for "mondegreen") and "Advance Australia Far" appear.
• Homestar Runner: In the Strong Bad Email "pop-up" book, a faulty sound chip in Strong Bad's hypothetical pop-up book causes his catchphrase "DELETED!" to come out as sounding like "the lake head"^note Including an Easter Egg of a picture of Manicouagan Reservoir, a crater lake in Quebec, Canada, that looks like Strong Sad's head and Police Quest.
• Red vs. Blue: In one episode, an exhausted and desperate Donut tries to deliver the important and cryptic message "It's under the sand" to Caboose, but because Donut is on the verge of passing out, his words come out as "It's under....thessssssand". Caboose hears it as "It's under this, and...", and Hilarity Ensues.
• The John Desire cover of Hot Limit by T.M. Revolution has a ton of these, in no small part thanks to the fact that it was originally a Japanese song that was translated into English and sung by an Italian band. The Animutation We Drink Ritalin has a collection of Mondegreens from the song.
• Tones on Tail: The remix of "There's Only One" is titled "Now We Lustre" after a mondegreen of the song's title when it's reversed.
• An article on an old Ultra Games advert gives a different interpretation on the dialouge:
  "I'm the creator of Ultra Games for Nintendo... I connect an ear to your commandoes, searching for deadly weapons. Defender... of the Crown — with strategic arson seizures, raves, and destroyers. And Skate... or Die. An eye-bladder event that pits you against friend or Bionic Lester. So check out Ultra Games, and remember: I'm not the father of your T. V."
• One of the staples of YouTube Poop, and by extension internet meme culture in general, is a dinosaur character from the infamously cheap and shoddy Dingo Pictures cartoon Dinosaur Adventure "Yee", taken from the cartoon's Italian dub. He is actually talking to the dinosaur named "Peek", but due to the low audio quality, the dubbing actor's odd voice and delivery, the minimalistic lip animation, and the parody clip's editing, people have misheard it as "yee" and ran with it. If one listens closely to the actual dub though (not to mention the original German dualogue and other language dubs), they can make out that the line is "Peek".
• A YouTube Poop mondegreens a line from Toy Story. (In case you're wondering, they're actually saying "gangway", as in "clear the way" or more bluntly "get out of the way".)

Warp Cone Mix (Webcomics)

• College Roomies from Hell!!!: The Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" was mondegreened as "Chimpanzee for the Devil" (admittedly, by a character who's a Cloud Cuckoo Lander)
  Roger: Well, the coolness levels of that song just dropped 666%.
• Com'c: Victor is prone to this. In addition, he is a horrible singer and doesn't realize either fact. This trait is shown already in the first strip.
  Marc: [singing] We gotta hold on, ready or not...
  Victor: [to himself] Oh, I know that one...
  Victor: [singing off-key] ''YOU GIVE UP THE BRIGHT WHEN IT'S KEPT IN A POT!"^note Actual lyric: "You live for the fight when it's all that you've got!"
• Girl Genius: At the masquerade ball, one of the many guests dressed as famous pop culture characters is cosplaying as Sephiroth, complete with a little gremlin-like creature hanging around his ankles singing a memetically mondegreened rendition of "One-Winged Angel":
  ...bells, frogs, big cherries, Peter Pan, magic cheese...
• Housepets!: On New Year's 2016, Sasha sings a bizarre take on "Auld Lang Syne" based on how she misheard the song's lyrics.
  Should old acquaintance be forgot and never thought to dine
  Should olden maintenance be forgot, an owl gang sign
  For Owl Gang Signs hoo hoo, for Owl Gang Signs
  We'll knock the feathers off your tail throwing Owl Gang Signs
• Oglaf: A strip titled "The erotic adventures of Lady Mondegreen" features a so-called king who constantly mishears everything as sexual. It turns out he was installed on the throne deliberately to discredit the institution of kingship.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • An early strip has Roy talking to Vaarsuvius while the rest of the party is asleep, only for Durkon to wake up and try to Turn Undead when he hears the name of an undead creature. First, Roy brings up the word "ghost", then V says "aghast" (which Durkon interprets as "a ghast"), and finally when he somehow gets "a lich is binding ghouls" from Roy saying "which is kinda cool".
  Roy: OK, now you're stretching it.
  • When the Order is making preparations to head out to Gerard's Gate, Roy asks Belkar to help him find a sextant. Belkar takes him to a group of prostitutes because he thought Roy said "sex taint". Then Roy asks about a cartographer, and Belkar finds him a cart of gophers.
• Paranatural: Max mishears "Sure be" as "Sherby", and pictures a sherbet Furby (pictured above).
• Partially Clips: In one comic, a musician realizes (mid-performance) that the lyrics to Eleanor Rigby isn't "Picks up her eyes", which ruins his interpretation that Eleanor is some kind of alien. This completely ruins his appreciation of the song.
• Rasputin Catamite: Attendees at the Christmas concert sing an English-language song phonetically with painful results.
• Roomies!, It's Walky!, Joyce and Walky!:
  • "She's got a chicken to ride, an' she don't care!"
  • "Hallelujah it's Raisinetts!"
• Shot and Chaser: Olly thought the title of Stevie Wonder's Boogie on Reggae Woman was Ornery Woman mistakenly hearing part of the chorus, which gives Tre a good laugh.
• Sluggy Freelance: In the "Minions Are Forever" arc, one of Dr. Nofun's subordinates turns "It's Raining Men" into "It's the reign of men."
• Suicide for Hire: Nightwish's "Romanticide" apparently includes the lyrics "Happy haunting, you taco-faced carny fork." (The actual line is, "Happy hunting, you double-faced carnivore.")
• Weesh: This comes courtesy of Tate, who can't quite get the hang of "Feliz Navidad".
  Tate: Fleas on my dog! Prospero baño felicidad! ^note A happy, prosperous bathroom

Weep, O Reginald (Web Original)

• Cracked: In "5 Reasons New Year's Ruins Everything Great About Drinking", number 2 is "The Music", because nobody really knows the lyrics to "Auld Lang Syne":
  Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never yab to bye, adaaa dada banana boat, and auld lang synnne.
• Snopes: An article on an old Disney picture/audio book mondegreens Rafiki's chant as "Squashed bananas up your arse".
• The Archive of Misheard Lyrics, whose website URL, KissThisGuy.com, comes from a mondegreen of Hendrix "Purple Haze", and Am I Right, are possibly the biggest archives of mondegreens in existence. Yes, you can submit your own.
• The Similou's All This Love inspired a mini fad on YTMND about the famous communist hero, Rainbow Stalin. The actual lyric was "rainbow styling", apparently referring to the act of wearing colorful clothing ("In your tank top, rainbow styling")
• A Cheezburger Network post featured a prank involving the duo of The Slow Mo Guys with Gavin Free pranking Daniel Gruchy with the Pipboy App. In the video, after he gets pranked, a laughing Gavin says "Sorry, Dan." Somehow, the person who put it up heard it as "Sorry, dad", leading to the article saying that a son pranked his father. It's become a small meme now that Dan is Gavin's father.
• A fair few YTMND sites are based on misinterpretations of song lyrics, such as "Lock the taskbah!" for "Rock the Casbah", "Thriller"'s lyrics "Night creatures call and the dead start..." reinterpreted as "Mike Richards caught in the death star", and the German-language David Hasselhoff song "Du" as "DEW!!!!!", which inspired the Dew Army.
• In cs188's "OPPA GODDAMN STYLE", the first part of the chorus ("areumdawo sarangseureowo") is subtitled with "I'm an owl, silence, you narwhal!"

Weave Busy, Oh (Web Videos)

• Andrew Mathas purposely mondegreens songs to make humorous videos.
• Caddicarus has fun with this when reviewing Vib-Ribbon, pointing out that the songs are full of easy-to-misinterpret Engrish:
  "Sunny day, I wank my Wii / I wake up ass cheeks so fine day"
  • Also, in his George Of The Jungle review, the music is so much louder than the voices that he hears Ursula say:
  Ursula: My head feels like it's gonna fall off! And my head is not in the shed! MY GODZILLA!
  • In one video, he makes an offhand mention of Kingdom Hearts, adding a clip from Kingdom Hearts III of Donald saying "What about the power of waking?" accompanied by subtitles which mishear "waking" as "wanking".
• CDZA did a whole video devoted to this phenomenon.
• CLW Entertainment: The official captions for the Doraemon 2005 fandub opening have a very bad interpretation of the lyrics. "Twisting my hard eye, magic rings raw meat round..."
• An episode of the Cream Heroes show Kittisaurus Villains does this gag when Lulu and Dodo search for a secret base. They try the sides of Claire's TV cabinet but hearing turns out to be a major issue.
  Lulu: This place seems nice, doesn't it?
  Dodo: I can't hear you, Boss.
  Lulu: I said [shouting so Dodo can hear] This. Place. Seems. Nice. Doesn't. It?
  Dodo: You misplaced your ice?
• The German YouTuber Coldmirror has produced quite a lot of videos mondegreening songs.
• Glove and Boots: "#CancelGloveAndBoots" opens with Mario and Fafa blogging about juice, which Mario says he doesn't like. When a troll watches the blog, he thinks Mario said he doesn't like Jews and tries to get the blog cancelled.
• In Grimbeard's review of The Ring: Terror's Realm, he refers to the player character as "Egg" after mishearing her introductory line. Without subtitles, her pronunciation is just ambiguous enough to sound like either "I'm Egg," or "I'm Meg." He realizes his mistake when he gets to scenes that are subtitled... but after getting frustrated by her stupidity, he decides she doesn't deserve the name Meg anymore, and he resumes calling her Egg deliberately.
• Headhunter Productions, the movie reviewing pony, done this in [his review of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny at the very first scene in an attempt to guess what the actors were saying due to how incomprehensible the dialogue was from them. Right before this, he commented that he had to do this "because you can't understand anything!"
  "We with the landlord scored happy diner powers and the heater worked all day long..."
• Some The Key of Awesome videos end with a rubber ducky singing, "The Key of Awesome!" in a manner that sounds kind of like, "Ducky of Awesome!"
• In Naruto: The Abridged Comedy Fandub Spoof Series Show, when Iruka announces the team line-ups in the style of the One Piece theme song, because he likes One Piece, he sings it as "Dreamin'! Don't give it up, Naruto! Dreamin'! Don't give it up, Sakura! Dreamin'! Don't give it up, Sasuke! Dreamin'! Don't give it up, that guy!" The actual lyrics to "Pirate Rap" by Russell Velasquez are "Dream it!", not "Dreamin'!" Again, it's unclear whether this was actually LittleKuriboh's mistake or just Iruka's.
• The Mysterious Mr. Enter: In Mr. Enter's review of "Keep Calm and Flutter On", Rainbow Dash calls Discord "dip-cord", and Mr. Enter mishears this as "dick-cord". He's so amused that he instantly gives the episode a score point.
• The Nostalgia Critic
  • In his review of Rock-A-Doodle in which, due to Edmond's lisp, it's hard to precisely make his voice out in several scenes (with him mocking it numerous times), and once, the Critic mistakes his shouting for Chanticleer as Santa Claus.
    Critic: That's Christmas, you moron! Santa Claus only comes at Christmas!
    • When Edmond is first turned into a talking kitten, he exclaims "Jeepers, I'm all furry!", which the Critic mishears as "Jeepers, I'm a furry!".
  • In his Captain N: The Game Master review, Critic hears the title as "Captain N: The Gay Master".
  • In the review of Doug's 1st Movie, characters keep mentioning an In-Universe amusement park called "Funkytown", but he insists they're saying "Fuckytown".
    Critic: Stop saying "Fuckytown!" It's a G-rated flick! Learn to pronounce your n's!
  • In his review of Richie Rich, he tries to figure out what Dr. Keanbeane says at one point ("My inventions!"). He hears it as "Mayan vengeance", "Mighty pensions", "Ma's infections", and "Marty's steakhouse".
  • In his sixth review of old commercials, known as Conquest of the Commercials (2015), he mistakes one McDonald's commercial's tagline, "For food, folks and fun", as "For food, fucks, and fun".
  • In Tentacolino, the shark's Villain Song has the seashells singing the chorus "Oh, you, you, there's no one meaner than you." However, it's so garbled the Critic mishears them.
    "Oh Hugh, Hugh,
    there's no whacking out of you.
    Oh, Mew, Mew,
    there's no walking on the Moon!
  • In Battle of the Commercials, he has trouble understanding the Green Goblin's line "You're running out of [web] fluid!" in a commercial for a Spider-Man video game for the Atari 2600, and he guesses the last part is "Blue Whip", "Bloo wigs", "flu weed", or "glue lids".
• Professor Juice:
  • In the Um Jammer Lammy review, during the song "Fire Fire!!", Rosie mishears the lyric "with the funk" as "what the fuck" and does a Spit Take.
  • In the Space Channel 5 Part 2 review, when Fuse gets hit by Purge's attack, Rosie says she first misheard Ulala calling out Fuse's name as "views", which made her think Ulala was more concerned about her ratings than Fuse getting hurt.
• Slowbeef of Retsupurae once made a video called "A Public Service Announcement to all Lets Players" wherein he attempted to read American Gods by Neil Gaiman whilst ZoopSoul LPed I Wanna Be the Guy. Everytime ZoopSoul dies, Slowbeef interrupts himself and says "Please Stop Lets Playing I Wanna Be The Guy." At one point he gets to the part where Shadow "was (secondly) going to towel himself off" and ZoopSoul ends up dying at that moment. It is commonly misheard as "Second he was going to tell himself, Please Stop Lets Playing I Wanna Be The Guy." In reality it's, "Second he was going to towel himself - Please Stop Lets Playing I Wanna Be The Guy."
• Rhettand Link have a series of videos where they intentionally do this with Youtube's caption feature called Caption Fail.
• Screen Rant Pitch Meetings: Along with Comically Missing the Point, sometimes, the Producer or Screenwriter will mishear what the other is saying, leading to a humorous misunderstanding.
  Screenwriter: This is gonna be called The New Mutants!
  Producer: Uhh, I'unno, I feel like they're gonna have to be clothed.
  Screenwriter: No, new.
  Producer: Oh, okay, that's probably fine.
• StacheBros: In "Let's Kill Luma", when Luma asks where its mama (Rosalina) is, Luigi thinks it said "Mona" and asks Mario if they know anyone named Mona before it corrects them.
• Taco-Man frequently expresses concern that the title of his Captain N parody, Taco-Man: The Game Master, sounds like, Taco-Man: The Gay Master, if someone puts the AcCENT Upon The Wrong SylLABle.
• That Dude in the Suede chose Return of the Phantom Stranger as the theme song for his Fandom Stranger series because Return of the Phantom Stranger sounds like Return of the Fandom Stranger.
• Music reviewer Todd in the Shadows sometimes points out lyrics that are easy to mishear:
  • From "Imma Be" by The Black Eyed Peas: "I'm a bee! I'm a bee! I'm a I'm a I'm a bee!" (It's actually repeating "Imma be")
    Todd: You're thinking it, I'm thinking it, Vice President Biden is thinking it.
  • "Eenie Meenie" by Sean Kingston and Justin Bieber: Eenie meenie miney mo lava...? (real lyric: "lover")
  • "Grenade" by Bruno Mars: Throw my head on a plate for ya! (actually "hand on a blade")
  • "3" by Britney Spears: One, two, three, why don't me, you, and me... (actually "not only you and me")
    Todd: How many Britneys are there in this equation?!
  • Subverted on "Club Can't Handle Me." The lyrics are so incoherent that he looks them up, only to find that they are the lyrics proper.
  • He actually called The Black Eyed Peas out on this during "The Time", on the grounds that they'd screwed up a line from the source material.
  • "S&M" by Rihanna: Ass, ass, ass and ham, ham, ham... (actually "S-S-S and M-M-M")
  • Any attempt before finding out Kanye is singing "I'm tryin' to bathe my ape in your Milky Way".
  • Likewise, the opening line of Ne-Yo's chorus in "Give Me Everything" (which he finds shocking, as Pitbull is supposed to be The Unintelligible there!).
    • Later in the same video, he invokes this on Ne-Yo's line "Let's do it tonight" which Todd hears correctly at first, but then replaces with "Let's do it to annoy".
  • Becomes a Running Gag in Flo Rida's "Whistle". Todd says that he's checked numerous lyric websites, and almost all of them have different lyrics because none of them can figure out what he's actually saying.
  • Miley Cyrus' "Wrecking Ball": "All I wanted was to break you off / all you ever did was raaaape me". (actually "all I wanted was to break your walls/all you ever did was wreck me")
  • Shawn Mendes' lyric "Better than he can" from "Treat you Better" puzzles Todd for a solid minute, making him guess "Been a daddy gad", "met a nannycam" and "bet on Dan Egan". He also mishears "wasted crying" as "wasted crime".
    • "Better than he can" returns later during the Worst of 2016 list, where the captions gradually go from the actual lyric to "bed a daddy can" to "batter candygram" to "pat a tan Negan" to "pet Dominican" to "yabba dabba damn" and finally "Albert in a can".
• In a similar vein to the Hungarian mondegreening of Nightwish's "Kuolema Tekee Taiteilijan" (see above), someone posted the (also Finnish) Timo Rautiainen & Trio Niskalaukaus song "Lintu" with misheard lyrics, which has gems like "kurváim úszkálnak" ("my bitches are swimming") and "Jaj lányom, szülj te buktát!" ("Oh, my daughter, give birth to a sweetroll!")
• RemyRaccoon:
  • In "Everything Wrong With Ratchet and Clank (PS4)", Vale mishears Agnogg Buckwash's last name as "Fuckwad".
  • In "Everything Wrong With Ratchet and Clank 2: Going Commando (Locked and Loaded)", Vale has trouble understanding one of The Thief's voice clips and their best guesses are "burnt the diaper", "rad indictment", and "bleh, a diet".
    • From the same video, Vale mishears the line "shriek with joy" as "shrink with joy" and criticizes the choice of words, a mistake they acknowledge in future videos.
• Yumi Kawamura and her Gratuitous English songs for Persona 3 and Persona 4 are full of this.
• In the K-pop episode of YouTubers React, Anthony and Ian of Smosh misheard the main line of the Girls' Generation song as "I got a boy on my chin". The real line is part English and part Korean, and translates to "I got a boy, a handsome one". With them being Smosh, this quickly went viral.
• Screen Junkies did a review of the 2005 Academy Awards which at first found Jack Black to be doing 'the greatest moment in Oscar history' as it sounded like he was singing "Screen Junkies", only to then realize it was "screen in our jeans".
• The Italian man who went to Malta, whose accent leads "two sheet(s)", "two pieces", and "a fork" to be misheard as something much dirtier and him to be called a son of a bitch. He delivers one back upon his departure.

Whack-turn Ann in Mansion (Western Animation)

• Adventure Time:
  • "Death in Bloom": Princess Bubblegum goes away on an errand and tells Finn and Jake that she'll return "on the Morrow", as in, her fast bird steed named "the Morrow". Finn thinks that she meant "the morrow" as in "tomorrow", and it isn't until the climax that Jake corrects him, forcing them to rush since Finn thought they would have more time to fix something they broke while she was gone.
    Jake: No, man, the Morrow is her bird!
    Finn: Come again?
    Jake: It's her bird, that thing is crazy fast. It'll only take her like twenty minutes to get back once that conference is over. Are you listening, man? (dramatic slow-motion) The Morrow is a biiird...
  • "Three Buckets": Played for Drama when Finn discovers that his robot arm has a variety of voice-activated functions. Soon afterwards, he's in a fight, and while trying to defuse the situation before anyone gets seriously hurt, he uses the word "finality". The arm's speech recognition misinterprets it as "fatality" and kills his opponent.
    Finn: Today doesn't have to have this kind of... finality!
    Robot arm: Fatality!
  • Adventure Time: Distant Lands: Centuries ago, Marceline's Break-Up Song "So Glad That I Woke Up" managed to repel a dragon that was attacking the Glass Kingdom. In "Obsidian", the citizens still sing this "holy song" to keep it at bay, but over the years it's morphed into "So Mad at the Coconut."
• The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Sale", Gumball overhears potential buyers for Mr. Robinson's house talking about the house when they are in the garden. When the man says "their soil", Gumball mishears it as "there's oil" and thinks there's oil underground under the Robinsons' yard.
• Animaniacs:
  • "Roll Over, Beethoven": Yakko, Wakko and Dot aggravate Ludwig von Beethoven by constantly mistaking the word "Pianist" for..... some other mondegreen that could arguably be heard in lieu. It doesn't help that the way Beethoven pronounces it as 'pea-en-ist' rather than 'pea-an-ist'.
  • "Bingo" is entirely based around this, with Wakko mishearing everything Dr. Scratchansniff says during their bingo game. For example, he thinks "B-4" is "before" and "I-30" is "I'm thirsty".
  • Wakko's Wish: The Warners mistake the Big Bad's name, Salazar, for "Salad Bar".
• Arthur: D.W. is very prone to mishearing words.
  • "Tales From the Crib": D.W. is telling Vicita the story of the time she began to sleep is a real bed which included the Tibble's story of the scary Arachnar who haunts children that have just gotten a big bed. She tries to reassure Vicita that Arachnar does not exist because he is an "Irving legend", told by one's Uncle Irving, rather than an urban legend. When Vicita points out that she does not have an Uncle Irving, D.W. dismisses him as an Irving legend as well.
  • "Postcards From Buster": D.W. has made several homemade postcards of New York City's famous landmarks, or rather her interpretation of them. They include the "Vampire State Building", "Rocks-of-Falling Center", and the "Statue of Liver Trees".
  • The various D.W. Christmas carols on the Arthur's Perfect Christmas album release are all about D.W. doing this with traditional Christmas carols, for example, performing "What Child Is This" as "What time is it when the little hand is pointing at the umbrella stand? Of all the things that Santa brings, I hope one's a digital clock." The gag finally comes to an end when she tries to perform "O Tannenbaum" ("O Christmas Tree") as "O Tanning Mom," resulting in Arthur telling her she can't sing anymore Christmas carols because she doesn't sing them right and her saying she doesn't understand why people like them, given that they aren't even about Christmas.
  • "D.W. Thinks Big": D.W. asks her mom if she can have "the oderant" like her cousin.
  • "Mom and Dad Have a Great Big Fight": D.W. doesn't want to be an "organ." She means "orphan."
  • "Arthur's Knee": Arthur scrapes his knee while at the dump, but doesn't want his parents to know because he wasn't meant to be there. Brain warns Arthur that he could get tetanus or staphylococcus if he doesn't tell a doctor. At the doctor's office, D.W. proudly says, "I told him all about Tetris and Indianapolis and all that stuff!"
• Batman: The Brave and the Bold: In "Cry Freedom Fighters!", Plastic Man rallies the oppressed inhabitants of Qward with a mangled version of "Yankee Doodle".
• In a singalong host segment of The Beatles, John asks Ringo for something for a romantic ballad. Ringo emerges with a voting booth.
  John: Not "ballot," you clod. "Ballad!"
  Ringo: Oh, that's quite another thing all together. (ducks in booth and re-emerges in dancer's togs) "Ballad." Sure. I'm a ballad dancer!
• Beavis and Butt-Head:
  • This is half the humor — standard phrases come into the duo's head and come out as a Double Entendre.
  • In one of the music video segments, Beavis and Butthead watch the video for the song "Sold My Fortune" by Sugartooth: due to the Yarling vocals, they hear the title drop as "sold my futon", and conclude the singer wrote it because he sold his used futon after buying a bigger bed.
• Ben 10: Ultimate Alien: When Jimmy Jones is naming some of Ben's aliens, he incorrectly identifies Jetray as "Jeffrey". Ben corrects him.
• Bugs Bunny:
  • "The Fair Haired Hare" has Yosemite Sam enjoy his newly built house by playing a song on a banjo and singing along. "Oh, I can't get a long little doggie / I can't even get one that's small." Sam is mishearing "dogie" (a calf that strays from the herd) as "doggie" (such as a retriever or a spaniel).
  • In “Backwoods Bunny”, a father/son buzzard duo, Pappy and Elvis, is trying to blast Bugs with a rifle with the son ordered to pull the trigger at the count of “four”. Since Elvis is a simpleton, Bugs is able to create a set of pipes to guide the shots to Pappy. Thanks to Elvis’ simple mindedness, he shoots Pappy at “four”, “for”, “far” ("I said 'far' not 'four'!”), “two-by-four” and when Bugs sings “I’m Overlooking A Four-Leaf Clover”.
• Count Duckula: In a flashback scene of "Dear Diary", an early and evil incarnation of Duckula rises with Igor nearby presenting a filled goblet.
  Igor: A nice aperitif?
  Duckula: (priming his fangs) Yes, they're lovely. And soon I shall be sinking them into... (sees drink) oh... "aperitif"!
• Daffy Duck: Daffy picks up a guitar and butchers a rendition of "Home on the Range." Being Daffy, he goes completely off-script with it: "Home, home, I'm deranged / Where the dear little cantaloupe lay / Where Sheldon and Herb / Are discouraging birds / In disguises not crowded all day."
• Danny Phantom: Butch Hartman clarified that many people get the lyrics wrong for the theme song. Many people mishear the very first word, "Young" for "Yo".
• Danger Mouse: "Hear! Hear!" has Penfold turning every statement he hears into a Mondegreen. That's because his ears are full of cotton.
• Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines: In "Pest Pilots," Dastardly tells his squadron to prepare for launch (as Muttley is to be shot out to the pigeon with a lit bomb). Muttley licks his lips and gets out a knife and fork.
  Dastardly: I said "launch", Muttley...not "lunch"!
• Donkey Kong Country: In "Follow That Coconut", after Donkey Kong and Diddy make Cranky forget his game plan for the upcoming soccer game, Cranky goes over to Bluster to ask him about it. However, Bluster has trouble hearing him over the sound of the Barrelworks' assembly line.
  Cranky: I SAID, DO YOU REMEMBER THE WINNING PLAY?!
  Bluster: What on earth are you talking about?! What windy day?!
  Cranky: WINNING PLAY!
  Bluster: Pay?! Surely, you don't expect any pay without actually working! Only my job allows for that!
  [Candy deactivates the assembly line]
  Cranky: SOCCER!
  Bluster: Sock her [Candy]? Cranky, whatever are you talking about? Why, I would never strike an employee! They could sue me.
• The Fairly OddParents!: In "Odd, Odd West" when Timmy turns himself into a cowboy to take down Vicky the Kid, he wishes Cosmo would be his noble steed; Cosmo turns into a cow instead because he thought Timmy said "steer".
• Family Guy:
  • "A Very Special Family Guy Freakin' Christmas": The lyrics for "Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly" are sung by Cleveland and Quagmire as "Deck the balls on Uncle Charlie..." In syndication, the line is partially muted, so all Cleveland and Quagmire say is "...on Uncle Charlie..."
  • Peter sometimes does this. For example, he once mispronounced Pewterschmidt as "Pieceofschmidt", Valerie Bertinelli as "Valerie Bertandernie" and Mr. Gutentag as (among many others) "Mr. Googlesearch".
  • One Cutaway Gag showed Peter recording an album of Christmas songs while not knowing the lyrics. This resulted in such gems as him singing "I brought these gifts for you, they're up in my bum..." to the tune of "The Little Drummer Boy".
• Histeria! did a number on the Pledge of Allegiance, with Loud Kiddington messing up every line. It included the "Richard Stands" mistake and ended, "One naked, undergarments, invisible man, with Liberace and puffed rice for all!"
• House of Mouse:
  • "Not So Goofy": José Carioca tells Goofy that he's going to teach him "poise and grace". Goofy thinks that José intends to make him poison Grace, which he finds both shocking and confusing since he doesn't even know a Grace.
  • "Dining Goofy": When Goofy attempts to help Clarabelle with her gossip, he misreports a lack of cheese as an infestation of fleas.
    Goofy: And I heard Minnie tell Mickey this building is infested with fleas.
    (several dog and cat guests run out of the club)
    Minnie: Goofy, I said the kitchen was low on cheese!
• Jackie Chan Adventures: In "Attack of the J Clones", the team has to deal with evil duplicates of themselves. When Captain Black refers to the duplicates as clones, Uncle thinks he said "clowns" and calls him an idiot, ranting that they not dealing with a circus.
• Kaeloo: In "Let's Play Peace, Man!", Kaeloo tries to convince Stumpy that peace is better than war. He asks her what he will get out of it, and she says he can win the Nobel Peace Prize. He mishears it as "Frozen Peas Prize" and tells her he doesn't eat peas.
• Kamp Koral: In "Squisery", Squidward asks Patrick if he read the camp handbook.
  Patrick: What is... "canned ham brook"?
• Kim Possible: In "The Mentor of Our Discontent", Shego says "Whoa, back off!" when an enamored Martin Smarty asks her name. Hilarity Ensues as he gets the idea that her name is "Miss Wobakoff".
• Madeline: "Madeline on the Orient Express" has its plot resulting from this — the chef on the train mistook a customer's request for a snack as snake and thus kidnapped the pet snake of another passenger to cook. This issue was hinted when Madeline asked for an ice cream cone and got a nice green bone instead.
• Little Princess:
  • "I Want My Snail": The cast holds a funeral for the Princess's dead pet snail Speedy. When they tell the Admiral, he says, "A funeral for a nail, you say?!"
  • "I Want My Puppets": The Admiral mishears "puppets" as "puppies", so when the Princess does a Little Red Riding Hood play, he thinks the puppet of The Big Bad Wolf is a puppy.
• The Loud House: In "Shop Girl", Lola shows her ditzy sister Leni how to act aggressive by tackling Lori and yelling, "I hope you like the taste of floor!" When Leni repeats Lola's behavior later in the episode, she instead yells, "I hope you like the taste of flan!" before pausing and asking to clarify if Lola said "flan" or floor".
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • "Applebuck Season": When Twilight asks "Can we talk?", a sleep-deprived Applejack misunderstands this as "Can bees squawk?" and "Twenty stalks", followed by mishearing "I need to talk to you!" as "I want to walk to the zoo". Later, she whips up some particularly nasty muffins (Even Pinkie Pie gets sick from them) because she is so tired she mishears the ingredients.
    Pinkie Pie: One last thing: wheat germ!
    Applejack: "Wheat worms?" That must be fancy talk for earthworms!
  • "Discordant Harmony": Discord hears "ginseng tea" and assumes it refers to tea that sings. He later changes the tea bags he bought to make them fit the version he had thought of at first.
  • "The Perfect Pear": A visual variant. Goldie Delicious' eyes aren't as good as they used to be, and she misreads "Feud with the Pears" as "Feud with the Bears".
  • "Marks and Recreation": When Apple Bloom recalls a saying of Granny Smith's, it turns out that when she heard it she mistook "find their own way" as "find their own hay".
    Apple Bloom: Granny always says, "Some ponies have to find their own hay."
    Scootaloo: Are you sure she didn't mean "find their own way"?
  • "Molt Down":
    • When Spike strains to speak in complete sentences, ponies, Smolder and Zecora mishear him as saying different things than the original intent.
    • When Smolder is warning Spike about potential predators of young dragons, he mishears "rocs" as "rocks" and asks why dragons would be afraid of stones.
• The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: In "My Hero", while trying to use mathematics, Owl says the word "hypotenuse", but Gopher mishears him and says, "Hey! Who are you calling a hippopotamus?"
• The Patrick Star Show: "The Yard Sale" has a visual example. As a traveling salesman, GrandPat finds a door that says "Go Away or Else!" He misreads it as "Go Away, Elsie!"
  GrandPat: Good thing my name ain't Elsie! [knocks on door]
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • "Imperfect Storm": Linda is ticked off when a pair of landscapers called "Du Bois" (pronounced "doo-boys") alter the backyard, and tells Candace what's going on. Due to the pronunciation, Candace thinks Linda is referring to "the boys", meaning Phineas and Ferb, and believes she busted them.
  • "Just Our Luck": Candace comes outside to greet the boys with a pie she made for their "Bust Day". Phineas mishears what she said as "Bus Day", which isn't for a week.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): "Meet the Beat-Alls" consists mostly of jokes centered around The Beatles references. One of them is the line "Someday monkey won't play piano song, play piano song", which is how a line in the song "Michelle" which is sung in French ("Sont des mots qui vont tres bien ensemble, Tres bien ensemble") sounds to many English speakers.
• Rayman: The Animated Series: In "High Anxiety", when the doctor asks Cookie to read an eye chart, he reads off "G-U-R-A-Q-T-I-N-V-U". The doctor hears it as "Gee, you are a cutie, I envy you" and gets flattered by what Cookie said.
• Ready Jet Go!: "Every Day Is Earth Day", Jet mishears the word "habitable" as "habit-a-bubble".
• Rugrats: While the babies usually just mispronounce words, sometimes they mishear them:
  • In one episode, Chas mentions a library, which they mishear as "lie berry". They wonder if that's a berry that makes you tell lies or a berry to lie upon.
  • In one episode, Lou tells the babies about the Sasquatch, which they mishear as "Satchmo".
  • "Baby Power": The premise is that Tommy didn't hear his parents properly when they mentioned baby powder, so he thought it was called "baby power" and made babies stronger.
• Sidekick: Eric tells Trevor that his old orphanage pal has "abandonment issues", and that you should never say "goodbye" to him. Trevor, however, mishears it as "banana mint shoes". This goes on to be a Running Gag and finally a Brick Joke when the "banana mint shoes" actually show up.
• The Simpsons has a couple some mondegreens:
  • "Pokey Mom": When Homer is shown a painting of a unicorn in outer space made by a prison inmate, and asked what it's breathing, he replies "Air." When told that there is no air in space, he replies, "There's an Air 'n' Space Museum", which gets him thrown out of the prison.
  • "Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song": Skinner mishears Superintendent Chalmers firing him as the former calling him a liar. After being corrected, he realizes that he'd rather have been called a liar.
    Superintendent Chalmers: You're fired.
    Principal Skinner: I'm sorry, did— did you just call me a liar?
    Superintendent Chalmers: No, I said you're fired.
    Principal Skinner: Oh. ...That's much worse.
  • "Grade School Confidential" has Homer claiming that he's been calling Mrs. Krabappel "Krandall", bemoaning the fact that no-one ever corrected him.
  • "O Brother, Where Bart Thou?" has Bart dreaming about different famous brothers, including the Smothers Brothers. The closing credits featured a banter between them in which one brother says "Take it Tom" which is misheard as "Take it Naked Bacon". Homer ends up chiming in that he too heard "Take it Naked Bacon".
    But folk singers never say "Take it Naked Bacon".
  • "The Father, the Son, and the Holy Guest Star": When Homer questions the way Bart is speaking while saying grace at dinner, Lisa says he's speaking Latin, "the language of Plutarch". Homer mistakes this as Pluto, Mickey Mouse's dog.
  • "Bart Sells His Soul" references the "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" example where Bart pranks his church into having the song played under the guise of "In The Garden of Eden".
  • "Homerpalooza": When Homer buys a Rastafarian hat and shows it to his kids, Bart says that Homer can't wear it due to not being Rastafarian himself. Homer brushes it off, since he's sure that he's "safarian".
    Bart: Dad, you cannot wear that, that's a Rastafarian hat!
    Homer: Pfft, hey, I've been safarian since before you were born.
  • "Million Dollar Abie": When Lisa protests bullfighting as being "a cruel pseudo-sport", Homer mishears her as saying that it's "a cool super sport" and enthusiastically agrees.
    Lisa: No, wait, wait! Bullfighting is a cruel pseudo-sport!
    Homer: Lisa is right! It is a cool super sport!
  • In "Mr. Spritz Goes to Washington", Marge asks Homer to perform CPR, so he starts singing Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising", and she corrects him, "Not CCR!".
• South Park:
  • "Ass Burgers": When Cartman's latest ruse backfires due to a mishearing of Asperger's, he discovers a food franchise opportunity when the other kids eat the hamburgers that, unknown to them, were shoved up his ass.
  • "Insheeption": Mr. Yelman mentions that he is herding his sheep while the regression therapist agrees that he is hurting them.
  • "It Hits The Fan": When the bar patrons are excited to hear "shit", Jimbo thinks another word is it at one point:
  Mitchell: I'm doing my job, Frank! We have to know where that evidence was shipped.
  Jimbo: Oh! Was that it? Was that it?!
  Randy: "Shipped". He said "shipped".
  • "Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy": Miss Stevenson tells Ike they're going to Milan, which he mishears as "Mulan".
  • "Simpsons Already Did It": The boys' misconstruing of the term "semen" as "sea men" causes them a lot of problems, particularly when they tell Chef they think they killed their teacher and they're about to get caught since their "sea men" were found in her stomach, leading Chef to assume they raped and murdered her. It's only in a later conversation where they go into more detail about what happened that things get cleared up.
  • "Tweek x Craig": When calling the President of the Republic of China to learn more about yaoi, Randy mishears his talk about the Rape of Nanking and, when conveying the information he learned to the rest of the adults, proceeds to tell them about "the rape of Don King."
  • "The Big Fix" introduces a huge and wide reaching one. The character Token Black is retconed into being name Tolkien Black after J. R. R. Tolkien all along. Stan had just misheard the name repeatedly. The show takes it a step further and changes the subtitles on previous episodes to reflect Tolkien’s name having “always” been that way.
• Space Ghost Coast to Coast:
  • In one episode, Space Ghost quotes one of Beck's lyrics back to him as "I got two turntables and my mommy's home." instead of "I got two turntables and a microphone.".
  • "Pavement": This is deliberately utilized during one of Pavement's musical numbers, in which the lyric "Living the high life" is constantly repeated and sounds like "Land of the hot knives".
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "Sleepy Time", SpongeBob enters Sandy's dream where they find themselves in freefall. Sandy tells him to activate his parachute, but he mishears her and says he already has his shoes. "Not a pair of shoes, SpongeBob!" He then pulls out a parakeet and she corrects him again, but is so distracted that she crashes while he falls out of the dream.
  • In "Krusty Love", Mr. Krabs tries to ask Mrs. Puff on a date only to become unbearably nervous and start speaking gibberish. In an effort to help, SpongeBob tries to translate his gibberish and comes up with several horrifying answers before finally getting it right. The answers include "He says he'd like to hit you with a rake." and "try and guess your weight!"
  • In "Arrgh!", Mr. Krabs takes Spongebob and Patrick on a treasure hunt using a map from a board game and a compass. After 10,000 paces, there is nothing, and Mr. Krabs says "But we did everything the map said! 10,000 paces east!" It turns out Patrick thought he said "West"^note which he mispronounces as "Weast".
• The Tick: Die Fledermaus has a name that sounds like "Deflator Mouse" to an English speaking audience. Those that have some understanding of German, however, will know that his name is German for "The Bat". Which suits him, as he is a Batman Expy.
• In Time Squad, in the episode "Old Timers' Squad", the protagonists have to fix a time error where Samuel Morse instead of inventing his Morse Code, instead invents a message system where messages are yelled from one person to another. He attempts to send a message to his mother saying "I will be a little late for the supper tomorrow", but after a few rounds across the entire states, the message that arrives to its destination says instead "YOU HAVE A GIANT BUTT!!!".
• Toot & Puddle: In "I'll Be Home for Christmas", a group of goats performs "Fa'owre, my hinny, fa'owre, fa'owre," which translates as "Fall asleep, my honey. Fall asleep, fall asleep." Toot performs it as "Fire away, my ninny, fire away, fire away!" before finally deciding to simply hum.
• Total Drama:
  • In "Not So Happy Campers, Part 1", Chris tells the contestants during the orientation that they will be using a communal washroom. In the original, un-bowdlerized version, Lindsay misunderstands this as "Communion washroom" and objects on the grounds that "I'm not Catholic."
  • The most prominent expression of Lindsay's Dumb Blonde stereotype is that she routinely butchers people's names in a mondegreen style. She normally gets either the first consonant sound or the first vowel sound right, and the Lindsay-fied name usually has the right number of syllables; but beyond that, all bets are off.
• Work It Out Wombats!: In "Secret Tunnels," Zadie misremembers lava lamp as "llama stamp" and spiral staircase as "spider suitcase."

Reel Live (Real Life)

• After the Cincinnati Bengals won a berth at Super Bowl LVI in early 2022, many people mistakenly referred to the Bengals as "The Bangles". The Bangles themselves found this rather amusing.
• People deciphering ancient manuscripts are often at risk of this trope, since the oldest frequently lack punctuation, lower-case letters and spaces between words.

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