With the spread of Chinese culture, Chinese characters are becoming more and more popular among non-Chinese native speakers, who often use some characters inaccurately. This may cause funny misunderstanding. In this article we examine the production mechanism of Chinese humour and the semantic opposition in language jokes. It is claimed that the language ambiguity triggerd by homophones, homographs and polesemies could be one of the main sources for Chinese humour. We successflully used Raskin's linguistic theory (1985) to analyse the Chinese jokes and confirmed Lin Yutang's opinions on Chinese humour: It is more an understanding smile than a big exploding laughter (Lin 1924).
Application of Chinese character humour in second-language teaching is also presented. We argue that the Chinese characters are a carrier not only of Chinese culture, but also of Chinese humor. By learning Chinese characters, learners should get more familiar with the different forms of language ambiguity and become more sensitive to the strokes, radicals and pronunciation of Chinese characters, and they should learn more about the origin and the development of the characters.

• 崔培玲(德國波恩大學漢學系講師，研究方向：對外漢語教學、幽默跨文化 比較、漢字認知) | Peiling CUI