This reminds me of a chapter in Deborah Fallows's book Dreaming in Chinese subtitled "Language play as a national sport," wherein the author describes the role of punning in Chinese humor. She writes:
Such language play works because the Chinese sound system uses only about 400 syllables, compared to 4,000 in English.... Because of its spare syllable structure, Chinese offers a heyday for punsters, jokesters, storytellers, blogers, twitterers and other language mavens.
Deadspin's comments have more depth than perhaps even the commenters realize.
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