hard of hearing? me?

So, Meffie, Laura and I are in Time Out, having a chat about this Friday's all-night-long Trade Justice Rally. Laura mentions that there's an ecumenical service on at some ungodly hour of the morning, and that we should go along.

Me - "What does ecumenical mean?"
Laura - "All denominations?"
Meffie - "It means universal, so yeah, it would mean that."
Me - "I knew that. Yeah I did."
Meffie - "If it's all denominations, how are they gonna do communion?"
Laura - "They probably won't do a mass, just a general service that everyone will like."
Meffie - "Oh... We had this distant relative in our family that died recently, my parents had to go to her funeral and it was this full length, proper Catholic Mass that went on for ages."
*ouch noises*

I hear - Laura - "Are you sure it was in England?"
I respond - by laughing like a drunk and slapping my thigh, thinking that Laura's just made a dead funny joke, implying that the distant relative was in fact the Pope, which I thought was terribly clever.
Laura actually said - "Was it all in English?"

Laura was wondering if the service was in English or Latin. She wasn't making a joke about Meffie being related to the Pope at all. Even worse, when I explained what I thought she'd meant, nobody found it funny.

Sigh.