Jimmy Carter Had the All-Time Funniest Joke Mistranslation

President James Earl “Jimmy” Carter Jr. died today at the age of 100, but his sense of humor will live on — just not in Japanese.

Like many presidents, the politician and humanitarian suffered a great many mockeries during his time in office, as well as for many decades afterwards. The pejorative “peanut farmer” was a running joke on 30 Rock as recently as last decade, and Carter’s mentions on beloved animated shows like King of the Hill and The Simpsons were similarly insulting, albeit playfully so — I doubt anyone really considers our late 39th president to be “history’s greatest monster” as the citizens of Springfield claimed when Mayor Quimby unveiled his statue.

However, never let it be said that Carter didn’t have a sense of humor. In fact, according to Saturday Night Live legend Ana Gasteyer, Carter was a huge fan of Dan Aykroyd’s impression of him on SNL, and the peanut farmer even had some jokes of his own, so long as you spoke English. When President Carter delivered a speech to an all-Japanese audience at a college in Osaka, Japan back in 1981, he tried to insert some levity by telling a short joke — one which the translator “repeated” in Japanese as, “President Carter told a funny story. Everyone must laugh.”

Carter first told the story that killed on Letterman during a lecture at Kansas State University in 1991. “So you can see that there are some advantages in having been president of the United States,” Carter said about the unexpected and, perhaps, undeservedly uproarious reaction to his speech from those impossibly polite Japanese students and faculty back in 1981.

Astoundingly, that’s not the only time that a translator turned Carter’s words into a killer punchline that he didn’t intend. When he visited Poland in 1977 as president, Carter's New York-born Polish translator turned “I left the United States this morning” into “I left the United States, never to return”; he expressed Carter’s intention “to learn your opinions and understand your desires for the future” as “I desire the Poles carnally”; and he interpreted the completely benign sentiment of “I’m happy to be in Poland” as “I’m happy to grasp at Poland’s private parts.”

Whatever his accomplishments as president, Carter’s legacy cannot be appreciated without acknowledging that he was the king of mistranslated comedy.