Here’s something from an ad I saw on the Taipei subway (MRT). It features cartoons of George W. Bush and Barack Obama shilling for some vitamin drink.

Bush (though he looks a bit more to me like the love child of W and maybe Prince Charles) is saying:

?C ?C
??????????C

Bù C, bù C.
H? gu?zh? bùnéng zh?y?u wéit?mìng C.

A rough English translation, filling in a few gaps:

Not just vitamin C, not just vitamin C.
When you drink fruit juice, you should not settle for just vitamin C.

Note: The C is italicized in the Pinyin version to emphasize that this is pronounced like a foreign (i.e., English) letter C rather than how C is pronounced in the Pinyin alphabet. The reason for this is that “bù C” is a pun on “Bush”, whose name in Taiwan is generally pronounced in Mandarin as Bùx?, unlike in China, where it is usually pronounced Bùshí.

Obama’s lines are more interesting:

?????? (??)
????????

Read in Mandarin this is:

?ub?m? [Obama], ?ub?m? (Táiy?).
M?i gu?zh? bù yào h?ibái m?i.

And roughly in English this is

Obama, Obama (Taiwanese)
When you buy fruit juice, don’t buy just whatever

But the text tells people to read ??? (?ub?m?/Obama) as Taiwanese (Táiy?), which means that it’s pronounced Au3-peh4-be2, which is a pun with what is written, in red for emphasis, ???.

??? in Mandarin is h?ibái m?i, which means to buy things indiscriminantly. In Hoklo (Taiwanese), however, this expression is O.1-peh4-boe2, thus a pun on Au3-peh4-be2 (Obama).

Also, h?ibái by itself is simply “black [and] white” (as in Obama and Bush).

And Obama’s name, like Bush’s, has different Mandarin forms in Taiwan and China. But that doesn’t have much to do with the ad.

As always, I welcome those who (unlike me) know Taiwanese romanization well to correct anything that needs fixing.