Can someone explain this joke to me? ( I’m not Bulgarian)

29 comments
  1. It’s a phraseme – in Bulgarian you can say, for example: “This laptop went to the cinema” which means “this laptop had broken”.

  2. In my opinion, it has something to do with the idea, that when you go to the cinema, you go offline/you are not available anymore and you can’t be reached. But that would be a personal interpretation. The fact is, it just sounds so cool among the young people. It is something we do a lot anyway – going to cinema.
    Edit: it is the modern version of another saying – the horse went into the river. Which means, that something important (the horse as most valuable belonging for the villager) drowned itself. Now life is supposedly fucked up.

  3. There’s no joke, it’s just an idiom. It’s so old that the vast majority of people are not aware of its origin, except maybe some linguists at BAN (the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences), and they don’t frequent Reddit. It’s also not limited to broken things, e.g. you can use it to say that a plan “went bust”.

    It’s possible that the origin was similar to the American cliche about a father “going out to buy cigarettes” and never coming back – a person “went to the movies” and disappeared, and later the idiom was extended to inanimate objects.

  4. The guy had no money, he wanted to go with out with the girl, but ” she went to the cinema” with another bloke was the start, and then everything that went to the cinema means it’s done can’t be recovered

  5. If we have to search for logic in the expression, when something breaks down, you can say that it is gone.
    – Where did it go?
    – It went to cinema! 😄

  6. It’s not a joke, it’s a factually correct statement. “Went to cinema” is a figure of speech. It’s very similar to “gone with the wind” maybe, except it has way more negative connotation. Maybe “went south” is a better example. Or shit hit the fan.

  7. This is not a joke, it’s just a literal translation of an idiom. “Отиде на кино” means “it all went to waste” or “it failed” or “it’s been irreversibly lost”. No idea how the idiom came to be. It’s just one of those expressions that can’t be translated literally.

  8. 1) During communist times we had no cinemas. Everything was working. Then democracy came. We have cinemas now. But now nothing works. That’s why we say something broken went to the cinema.

    2) In big American movies they often blow up stuff. When something gets broken, it needs to be destroyed. That’s why we “send” it to the cinema to be blown up.

    3) When you go to the cinema, most of the time you get disappointed by what you see. The same way you get disappointed when you see a broken item.

  9. It’s not really a joke, but more of a figure of speech. It means something was wasted or broken.

    It has the same function as saying something went “down the drain” in English.

  10. In , when something gets broken, we say “aia e !”. Which directly translates to, I don’t care that is broken, some people died and they are fine.

  11. We also have a slang to call a person who is very deep down in the simulation – “it-movie-itself”; филмар, филмирал се e.

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