甚麼名字 The Parrot Answers Every Question
又問：「那裡去的？」又道：「那裡去的。」又問：「你叫做甚麼名字？」又答道：「我叫做甚麼名字。」又问：「那里去的？」又道：「那里去的。」又问：「你叫做甚么名字？」又答道：「我叫做甚么名字。」
逐句解 Line by line
They asked again, "Where are you going?"
The fiends have not yet noticed anything wrong, which is part of the comedy. 那 is nǎ again, the questioning reading.
And again he said, "Where are you going."
The second repetition confirms it is not an accident. 那 keeps its nǎ, because he is still copying the words in front of him.
They asked, "What is your name?"
A third try, and a simpler question, as though they are testing whether he is deaf. 甚麼 is the ordinary vernacular what.
And he answered, "What is my name."
The one variation in the whole run is that he swaps their you for his my, which somehow makes it worse. He is processing the grammar and not the meaning.
Three questions, three echoes. The joke is stretched to exactly the length it will bear and then stopped, which is the mark of a teller who has performed it in front of an audience and knows when the laugh peaks.
The small pronoun swap in the last line is the detail that makes it art rather than repetition. Bajie is not simply broken; he is applying a rule. He knows that when someone says your you answer with my. He has the mechanics of conversation and none of the substance, which is a recognisable state for anyone who has tried to hold a conversation in a language they half know.
There may be a sly point buried here as well. Bajie is a disciple whose whole task on this journey is to carry words he does not fully understand from one place to another. For three lines he does exactly that, perfectly, and it is useless.