Question about odd phrases?

Im watching love on the spectrum and kelvin is talking to the chef and he says “this shrimp is strong” and the chef responds with “yes, Ebisu”, the God of fish? Does this conversation make sense to native Japanese speakers or am I missing something?

3 comments
  1. I’m not a native Japanese speaker, and I feel like there’s more missing context here, but here’s what I’ve got

    So translating what you’ve written into casual Japanese literally we get:

    このエビ強い

    Kono ebi tsuyoi

    うん、えびす

    Un, ebisu

    Tsu and su are pretty similar sounding, so we could assume the chef misheard it as: “Kono ebisu yoi.”
    This is an odd, but grammatical sentence. It would literally mean “this Ebisu is good.” But it’s not a question, or at least whether it is or not depends on the speakers intonation. However, if we assume the first speaker isn’t asking a question about whether the shrimp is strong or not then this isn’t a question. Even if it were a question it would mean “Is this Ebisu good?”, so the reply “yes, Ebisu.” still doesn’t make sense.

    So in the end, I think I see how such a pun could be made, but I think I’m missing enough context to determine exactly what the pun is or how it makes sense.

  2. Do you have a link so we can hear what is actually said for context? えびっす would be a normal casual speech version of 海老です

  3. Was it エビ強い or something like エビ強っ because usually in casual speech if you’re stating something you cut out the い in place of っ. Saying このエビ強っ and then the other saying うん、えびす kind of makes sense if they misunderstood what the person said since it’s a very similar pronunciation… I don’t know though, I’m just guessing

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