My funny Chinese joke

Now that we're here visiting my in-laws, I get to use the funniest joke that I've ever made up in my entire life, counting years of making up knock-knock jokes in my childhood.

So as I've written, in an attempt to not be an idiot American on our trip to China this past fall, I spent a lot of time working on learning some basic Mandarin Chinese.  I studied from books and worked with a tutor.  In some ways, Chinese is much easier than other foreign languages (no tenses, no subject-verb agreement, no gender), but in other ways it's much harder (tones, written language mostly unrelated to spoken language, very different sentence structure).

One of the very first things I learned were my question words -- what (shunmuh), why (wayshunmuh), who (shay), where (nar), how many (gee), how much (dwoshau), etc.

And one of the more basic questions I learned how to ask is where something was.  The sentence structure for that is to say "where is there ____?"  The word for "is there" in that type of sentence is "yoh".

So I learned to say:

Where is there restaurant?
Where is there subway?
Where is there bus?
Where is there train station?
Where is there departure gate/platform?
Where is there museum?

All of those set up as "nar yoh ____?"

And of course now that we're back in the US, we still use Chinese expressions sometimes.  This is just one of those weird things my husband and I do, and we do with lots of our trips and foreign expressions.  I'd say more than 50% of the time that I say "thank you" to my husband, I say it in Bosnian ("havala") and he responds in Bosnian with "you're welcome" ("naymahnahchaymu").  Anytime I need to say to him "I need to speak with" (or something similar), I say it in Russian ("munyah nooznah pahvahgahreets").  So of course I keep using Chinese expressions.  Probably my most frequent choice is why ("wayshunmuh").  In fact, pretty much every time I have to ask my husband why, I ask in Chinese. 

When we were home for Christmas, totally unplanned, I busted out my best ever Chinese joke when I was trying to figure out where my mother was.  I didn't learn familial relation words in Chinese (other than husband and wife) since I didn't think they'd be relevant, so of course I had to use the English word for mom. 

So I asked my husband:  "Nar yoh mama?"

Since it came out with "yo mama" in it, it totally cracked us up.  Like seriously, laughing way too hard.  No one else in my family thought it was quite as funny as we did. 

And now that I'm in Pittsburgh visiting the in-laws, I get to use the joke again and again, pretty much every time I don't know where my mother-in-law is.

Ahahahahaha.  (Did you know that's how they write laughter in Italian?  Instead of starting with the H and going hahahaha, they start with the A.)

Guess you had to be there.  No idea why I shared that story.  Maybe there is one other person who would know a little Chinese but enough English to remember "yo mama" and would also find it absolutely hilarious. 

My very own joke.  Wonder if anyone else has ever laughed at that.