草泥馬

When we lived in China many years ago now, my wife and I encountered a form of Chinese humor that is really quite dominant there: the homophonic pun. Chinese is a monosyllabic language: every character is named by a syllable, and there being only so many monosyllabic sounds you can make, many of them sound exactly or almost exactly alike. Some of them differ in tone -- Chinese is a heavily tonal language, with a big difference in meaning possible if you employ this tone instead of that one in sounding the word. Others of them don't differ at all, and you just have to know that two different meanings are possible. 

An interesting work project lately has been researching Chinese anti-regime online protest language. An important figure is the mythical Grass Mud Horse, which fights the evil River Crab. The words for "River Crab" are a homophone for "Harmony," the excuse the regime uses for censorship online; and the words for "Mud Grass Horse" are a homonym for "F*** your Mother." 

Also, the Chinese Communist Party is colloquially referred to as "Mother."

The Cantonese dialect -- like many dialects -- uses the same writing system as Mandarin and all* the other Chinese languages, but the characters are pronounced differently by verbal speakers. What that means practically is that a whole different set of puns are possible if you speak Cantonese, like they do in Hong Kong, and the Mandarin-speaking Party elites can't really censor them because they don't understand the jokes. They don't realize what is being said, and so Cantonese protest puns are going wild right now in spite of the whole PRC Great Firewall effort.

* Except Cantonese as used in Taiwan. This uses the original, traditional form of the written language; all of the People's Republic parts have switched to 'Simplified' Chinese characters. For example, the Chinese people is written in Simplified Chinese as  汉人; in traditional Chinese 漢人.