(d) You cannot applaud with one hand.
(e) One's house is best protected by a wasted garden outside and an ugly wife inside.
(f) A one-foot kick (a jack-of-all-trades).
For many of these Chinese sayings (like [(a)], 'Melons and pears,' above), as Shakespeare so aptly wrote, 'Brevity is the soul of wit'.
Although not always easy for foreigners to comprehend, Chinese humour is in some ways similar to western humour in that it includes satire, farce, punning and sudden juxtaposition. But there are of course differences. A one-liner that Nury Vittachi sometimes uses when he entertains a group of Westerners goes like this: 'If a man speaks in a forest where there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?' But when he switches audiences, for Asians he says it sometimes works better if you say, 'If a woman says something in a forest where there is no man to hear her, is she still wrong?' Vittachi was sometimes described by Hong Kong's last British Governor, Chris Patten, as ‘the funniest man in Hong Kong.'
Much of the difference would appear to be due to social conditioning. The author agrees with Vittachi that jokes based on word-play or societal conventions only work where the language or society allows them to work even if there are also deeper differences. Vittachi also says that he uses a lot of irony when Westerners are present but little, together with sarcasm or sardonic humour, when the audience is largely Asian. Westerners also, quite naturally if the language is English, guess punchlines much faster allowing them to be abandoned entirely in some cases.
A sample opening of the comedy he uses is:
"Thanks for inviting me to this Women's group. It's not the most mis-directed I've received. Last week I got some junk mail from a sports shoe chain store. The letter began "Dear Basketball Player ... (Westerners chuckle).... I'm 5 feet 4 inches tall (Asians chuckle)....." This may be, because they are more familiar with the concept of stand-up comedy.