Warner Bros. Knew Exactly What It Was Doing With That Racy French ‘Barbie’ Poster — Here’s Why

Scott Roxborough
Thu, June 22, 2023 at 7:18 PM EDT · 3 min read



When a new international poster for Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Barbie movie hit the internet last week, it went viral, apparently for all the wrong reasons.

The French version of the poster looks innocuous enough. It features star Margot Robbie as the pink-clad doll-come-to-life and Ryan Gosling as her blond sidekick Ken. But the French tagline: “Elle peut tout faire. Lui, c’est juste Ken” — meaning “She can do everything. He’s just Ken” — has an NSFW double-entendre meaning in French slang, where ken is another word for “fuck.” So the tagline becomes: “She knows how to do everything. He just knows how to fuck.”

Read like this, Gerwig’s PG-13 comedy satire becomes an R-rated raunchy sex comedy. ... The internet, being the internet, lapped this up. Several French Twitter users tweeted photos of the posters with comments on the “accidental” or “unfortunate” translation. Naturally, it went viral, with some of the original tweets getting viewed millions of times.

Lui, c’est juste Ken



Just why this is so hilarious for French speakers takes some explaining. In the so-called “verlan” slang, which first became popular in the 1980s, French words are given a new meaning by switching the order in which the syllables are pronounced. Tomber (to fall) becomes be-ton (concrete). In this case, forniquer or its shortened version, niquer (to fuck) becomes queni or keni, which over time has been shortened to just ken. ... Then, in the Barbie tagline, “Lui, c’est juste Ken” changes its meaning because c’est (he is) and sait (he knows how) are homophones. “He is just Ken” becomes “He just knows how to fuck.”

In France, the Barbie poster drew little shock and indignation — it takes more than a raunchy pun to startle La Grande Nation — and, initially, most French speakers assumed the double entendre was the result of a bad, or a too-literal translation. But the pun was so obvious — ken as slang for “fuck” is common parlance for anyone under 30 in France — many began to suspect the poster’s NSFW message was a deliberate act of guerrilla marketing.

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