What's wrong with my joke 这位外科医生不礼貌，他总是说脏话, and how can I salvage it?

Question

这位外科医生不礼貌，他总是说脏话。

Today I attempted to make the above joke on my WeChat 朋友圈. It's meant to be a play on words, with 脏话 meaning "profanity", but also 脏 (zàng​) referring to bodily organs. So I'm using 脏话 in a deliberately obtuse way to mean something like "discussion of bodily organs". The surgeon is impolite because he's always talking about bodily organs.

However, nobody seemed to think it was funny (not a single 赞!), and I'm trying to figure out why.

Maybe I should have been more obvious with my plan on words, such as:

这位外科医生不礼貌，他总是说脏话：心脏、肺脏等等。

Although I thought 外科医生 = "surgeon" made it clear that 脏 was pertaining to organs.

Question: What's wrong with my joke 这位外科医生不礼貌，他总是说脏话, and how can I salvage it?

Answer 1

I believe when natives see the phrase 说脏话, they automatically pronounce 脏 as zang1, thus losing every humor there. It's different from English homonyms. In English homonyms sound really similar, however in Chinese difference in tones is practically as big as the difference in Pinyin.

Especially in this scenario, where 说脏话 is so fixed a phrase that it left no space for it to be otherwise perceived. If, however, a newly-made word was here, people will spend time trying to decipher it, to think about how one character may be pronounced, and might get the joke.

Another reason is probably that 脏zang4 is almost never used individually, you say either 内脏 or 脏器.

P.S. These two meanings are only written in the same character because of the simplification rolled out in the 1950s. They are different in the past and when written in traditional Chinese.

Answer 2

As Lily pointed out, this joke would not make sense especially when you say it out loud because those two 脏 have different pronunciations/tones. However, there might be a remedy since you are just trying to write it on your WeChat moments. I might write the following:

这位外科医生不礼貌，他说话总是带脏字：内脏，心脏等等。

This is better in the sense that indeed all the words 内脏心脏 carry the letter 脏 and by 说话带脏字 you are taking the literal meaning of it instead of the fixed phrase meaning people used to (kinda equivalent to 说脏话）, so it's like a plot twist, while by using 说脏话 it's harder to achieve this effect.

Answer 3

The other answers already covered why the joke may not be so well received.

However, I would not go so far to say it does not make sense at all (because I appreciated it, even if it is after your explanation).

Indeed, this sort of humour is specific and not appreciated by everyone, and sometimes it is humourous exactly because it is so unfunny.

In Chinese, certain sorts of jokes are commonly known as 冷笑话 (lit. cold jokes), which literally means jokes that would not cause any reaction in the audience (冷场, lit. cold venue).

A common theme in some of these jokes is to uncommon interpretation or parsing of homophones, homographic heterophones and/or ambiguous sentence structures.

The (anti-)humour element relies on often absurd interpretation of words and sentences that are often obviously illogical.

For example, a rather well-known humour account (冷兔, as you can infer from the name they are known also for cold jokes) today just (re)posted the following:

知了掉进泉水淹死，也算泉下有知了 (le)。

知了掉进泉水淹死，也算泉下有知了 (liǎo)。

Interpretation 1: If a cicada fell into a spring and died, it still lives after its death (lit. knows under the spring; the yellow spring = where people go after death).

"Interpretation" 2: If a cicada fell into a spring and died, then there is a cicada under the spring.

which in some way is like the joke you tried (a non-obvious pronunciation).

These jokes are not funny to many people because they require further process of the information since the "humour" is not obvious and initially absurd. In this case, one thing you may do is to actively ask people to think, for example, by making it a 脑筋急转弯 (brain teaser):

问：为什么这个人对医院里的病人脏话连篇？ 答：他是一个医生，对一个病人说他心脏不好，又对一个病人说他肝脏有问题。

or

问：为什么说这个医生不礼貌？ 答：因为他脏话连篇，对一个病人说他心脏不好，又对一个病人说他肝脏有问题。

By actively inducing people into the "thinking mode", the humour may be more easily accepted.