My Cake Explodes

All of a sudden I’m getting a surge of traffic to this old photo of my birthday cake from 1984.

I trace the hits back to a tweet from a journalist in Paris (with a Troll 2 background no less) named Alex Hervaud. Dude’s got 6,718 followers. Here’s the tweet:

Si j’avais fêté mes 17 ans aux States, et si je m’étais appelé Bart, j’aurais kiffé qu’on m’offre ça http://bit.ly/9Q1DXI

My French is a little rusty (as in nonexistent) but Google Translate tells me this means, roughly:

If I celebrated my 17 years in the States, and if I had called Bart, I’m offered that I kiffe http://bit.ly/9Q1DXI

OK, I think I get the general idea. Still, something seems to be lost in translation. The message in question was retweeted by two other people. So there must be some humor I’m missing.

And what does kiffe mean? According to the infamous Urban Dictionary:

Kiffe comes from an arab word (kef) which means to like, to enjoy, a pleasure… which has been “imported” into France by North African people… and became “kiffe”.
It simply means “to really enjoy someone or something!”
e.g: I kiffed that trip!
I would kiffe to meet her;
She really is kiffable
What a kiffe to drive that car!

Because it comes from some sort of French suburb slang (langage des cités), but is now used by everyone (though it is still ‘slangish’), you can use it how you want to!

There are also some sexual definitions for kiffe, but I’m going with the one cited above. After all, my mom made that cake, so let’s keep it clean — eh, M. Hervaud?