Americans can eat Chinese, but Chinese can't eat Americans?

No offence!! Please take it just for knowledge. I heard one of my friends saying Americans can eat Chinese but Chinese can't eat Americans. He said so for fun, and everybody was just laughing. But I want to know how the English language comes into the picture.

One thing, I guess, is that there is a game of plurals. Where Chinese in singular and plural has same letters, but not American?

P.S Of course, it was about Chinese food.

Solution 1:

It's very common in the UK to say 'Let's go for an Indian' meaning let's go to an Indian restaurant and eat Indian food. Historically this is because of the large number of people arriving from India who opened restaurants, a novelty in the 1960s and 70s.

This was brilliantly satirised in the 1990s by the sketch show Goodness Gracious Me where the cast 'go for an English':

One of the more famous sketches featured the cast "going out for an English" after a few lassis. They mispronounce the waiter's name, order the blandest thing on the menu (apart from one of them, who opts for the tastier option of a steak and kidney pie) and ask for twenty-four plates of chips. The sketch parodies often-drunk English people "going out for an Indian", ordering chicken phall and too many papadums. This sketch was voted the 6th Greatest Comedy Sketch on a Channel 4 list show.

So I guess people could say 'Let's eat American' (singular) - whether they do or not is another matter. America is such a mixture of different cultures that it might be hard to define what an 'American' is, in food terms.

Solution 2:

It's playing off the fact that the plural for persons from China and the adjective to describe things that are from China are the same; it's essentially a pun.

Americans can eat Chinese because we often refer to cuisine by its preceding adjective and allow the noun to drop implicitly. Similarly, you'd see "Americans can eat Indian" or "Americans can eat Mexican". In all cases, the implication is "Americans can eat Chinese [food]", or "Americans can eat Mexican [food]"

Chinese can't eat Americans because "Americans" isn't an adjective anymore but a plural noun. Chinese would simply eat American. As with the prior example however, you'd never see "Americans can eat Indians" or "Americans can eat Mexicans". (And Americans eat American all the time as well!)

TL;DR It's a pun on the peculiar homophones that can result from certain demonyms which, in english, don't take on a standard plural form. Other examples would include Japanese, and British