via: danwei
An old man takes sick with a rare disease. The doctor tells him “This is a serious illness, my friend, but we can cure it for you. There’s a special Chinese herbal medicine that will fix you right up. But there is one problem: the prescription requires that you drink milk with it.”
“Why, that’s no problem.” the old man says.
“HUMAN milk,” clarifies the doctor.
“Well, that’s no problem either. It just so happens my daughter-in-law just gave birth to a baby. I can just get some milk from her.”
“Sorry, but there’s one more requirement,” says the doctor. “The milk has to be drunk directly from the breast, otherwise it loses its effectiveness.” Whew. This might be a little tricky. What can he do? The old man has no choice but to directly approach the daughter-in-law with his problem. He explains his predicament to her, and she is quite understanding.
“It’s a matter of life-and-death,” she says. “Of course I’ll help you.” So she timidly opens up her blouse and lets the old man suck the milk. But he has barely had one mouthful than the son — who had heard that his father was ill — returns home from work early. Opening the door and seeing his young wife there with his very own father in this rather compromising situation, he is understandably pretty pissed off.
“Dad!” the son cries in shock. “What the hell are you doing?” The father, seeing his son’s displeasure, stands up indignantly and says, “So! I drink one mouthful of your wife’s milk and you get this upset? Have you forgotten how much of MY wife’s milk YOU drank when you were a baby?”
sort of a “meat”joke. the famous northeastern style crosstalk master Zhao performed such a “meat”joke in CCTV and received numerous protests from the audience.
the dying of traditional chinese crosstalks, for many reasons, is a sad thing, but you may find its various new forms today, there is a show in shanghai's oriental tv channel that could be called a crosstalk show, the host is short and funny, he talks with many movie stars, singers, all kinds of funny people and makes fun of them.
and if you want to enjoy the traditional chinese crosstalks, go to a video store and buy tapes, there are many of them there. i used to listen to crosstalk tapes with my walkman in a bus, and people stare at me, confused what music makes me laugh out.
chinese may run short of many things, but there is one that chinese people never lack - the sense of humor.