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In Friends Season 01 Episode 07 "The One with the Blackout" in this scene, it seems that Ross says something to Paolo in Italian. From the context it seems he is asking "Do you understand?".

A few script sites have that line written as:

ROSS: Yeah! Se vice?

For some reason they have the English bit wrong because Ross clearly says (assuming the Italian isn't also wrong):

So, do you erm... se vice?

However I put "se vice" into Google Translate and it didn't translate from Italian. Is Ross trying to speak Italian here? If so, what is he actually trying to say?

Also, what's the joke? The audience laughs when he says it. If the joke was that he had got the Italian wrong, surely most people watching wouldn't know that.

Update: I checked the subtitles on Netflix and it was spelled “ceviche”, but same problem - that doesn’t translate either.

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    I haven't seen the episode in years ,but my guess would be that he says "capiche?", which is an anglicisation of the Italian idiom meaning "Do you understand?"
    – user1118321
    Sep 30, 2018 at 20:59
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    I found a clip and watched it a couple times, and I too was wondering if he was trying to say "capiche". The laughter would then be because he pronounced it so wrong.
    – GendoIkari
    Sep 30, 2018 at 21:17
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    I think the joke was that he said the name of a dish while trying to speak italian.
    – ibrahim mahrir
    Oct 1, 2018 at 11:23
  • It does sound a little bit like "si dice", almost as if Ross was trying to say "come si dice?", which is Italian for "How do you say?". Of course, that doesn't make much sense grammatically with the rest of his sentence, but it is something you might say when trying to communicate with someone across the English-Italian language barrier.
    – Paul D. Waite
    Jan 12 at 12:15

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Ceviche is a typically south american dish (from Peru, according to my Peruvian coworker). So the joke is that Ross was trying to speak italian and saying "Capisce?", which means something like "got it?", as you would probably have heard in italian mafia based movies, but instead said the name of a dish.

That probably went over a lot of peoples heads if they don't know the dish, but i also think the delivery was poor, as he didn't say it as you would normally say "capisce", it was so subtle for a somewhat obscure reference that it doesn't sound like a joke.

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