植物人

Vegetables

Q：非洲食人族的酋长吃什么？
A：人啊！
Q：那有一天，酋长病了，医生告诉他要吃素，那他吃什么？
A：植物人！

What a chief of man-eating tribe eat?
People,of course.
Let’s say one day, the chief was ill, his docter told him he should be vegetarian, what he eat, then?
Vegetables.

    The vegetables here doesn’t mean something to eat, it refers to those people without conscious, or can’t move phiscally. Knowing this, you will find the joke can be a joke in English. And the humorous point is the same with that in chinese,that is vegetarian吃素 and vegetables 植物人 have something in common, which remind you of one of the words when you heard the other.

    植物 means plants in chinese. 人 is human. So if the chief eats human and now he needs to be vegetarian, eating vegetables sounds like the perfect answer.

                                                                            Hokey