Riddle:

A man was found murdered in a room with 53 bicycles. Why was he murdered?

The Informant was a nineteen year old female friend that I had dinner with. I told her about the catch riddle we learned in class (what do virgins eat?) and she began telling me all of these riddles that she knew.

Collector: He was a bad man?

Informant: No.

Collector: Did he steal all of the bicycles?

Informant: Nope, try again.

(After several minutes of guessing and failing, she gave a pivotal hint)

Informant: Think of Bicycles as a brand, not as objects. I told you this was a hard one.

Answer via Informant: Well, bicycles is a type of card – you know, poker cards…bicycle playing cards. You’ve heard of those, right? Yeah, yeah. And how many cards are in a deck? Yeah, 52. So the guy was cheating, he had an extra card… so they killed him!(Seemed a little too excited by this).

Collector: Where’d you get this riddle from?

Informant: A high school friend.

Riddles in general are very interesting considering that nothing is ever what it seems to be. You have to really think outside of the box in order to figure out the answer, but it also makes it difficult when a person is not familiar to something that’s being referenced, such as with the brand “bicycles”. I told the same riddle to my dad and he had never heard of Bicycle playing cards, which made it pretty much impossible for him to figure out the answer. So, it can be considered a way of distinguishing between groups: those that understand the references and those who don’t.