Author Archives: Nick Neal

Old Man and the Well Joke

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: USC Student Housing
Performance Date: 2/20/23
Primary Language: English

Main Performance:

JC: Why’d the old man fall in the well?

Me: I don’t know, why?

JC: He couldn’t see that well.

Me: *Laughs*

Context: The informant is from Cleveland, Ohio. To the best of his memory, he recalls hearing this joke from a friend his sophomore year of high school.

Thoughts/Analysis: The main crux of the joke relies on its use of a double entendre in the word “well”. Without the context of the setup, the punchline simply refers to the old man’s vision being poor, or not well. But with the added context, the listener questions whether the teller means the old man’s vision is poor, or if it is selective towards specific wells. Although some might consider the joke lame, I found it at least a little funny.

Electricity Riddle

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: USC Student Housing
Performance Date: 2/20/23
Primary Language: English

Main Performance:

HG: Basically you’re in this, like, house that’s like a labyrinth, or whatever. Um… and there’s no electricity and its like dark and whatever, and there’s these doors. There’s these three doors, um… I’m gonna tell you the doors and you pick, actually.

Me: Ok.

HG: So the first one, there’s Red Door, Blue Door, and Green Door. Which one do you pick?

Me: Blue Door.

HG: Ok, um… and then there’s door one, two and three. Which one do you pick?

Me: One.

HG: One? Ok, and then there’s pink door, white door, and black door. Which one do you pick?

Me: White.

HG: White? Ok, um… then there’s five doors. One with a picture of a giraffe and the other four are just one, two, three, and four.

Me: Three.

HG: Ok… Lotta people pick the giraffe door but that’s ok.

Me: *Laughing*

HG: And then finally there’s three more, its just sky door, grass door and moon door.

M: I’ll go with moon door.

HG: And then you’re presented with three options, you finally enter this room and um… they are all ways to die, basically. The first way is to enter a cage with a lion in it. The next is you have to hang yourself. And then the last one is an electric chair. Which one are you picking?

Me: The electric chair.

HG: Aw yeah why’s that

ME: *Laughing* Because there’s no electricity in the house!

HG: *Laughing* Aw f*ck you


Background: The respondent heard the riddle in middle school to the best of his memory. He is from New York City.

Thoughts/Analysis: I had definitely heard a riddle with the same sort of punchline before the informant had told me his riddle, but I didn’t realize it until he said the last option. To someone who hasn’t heard the riddle before, it is supposed to rely on the complex steps that the riddler walks the subject through before arriving at the final decision. You are thinking about so many things throughout the course of the riddle that you forget one of the basic things about the house. In the performance of the riddle, the informant took many “thinking” pauses between each of my decisions to try and signal to me that he was thinking about the path that I was taking in order to throw me off.

Goldfish Riddle

Performance Date: 2/14/23
Primary Language: English
Language: German

Main Performance:
JC: Alright, so, my name is JC and I heard this riddle the other day here in my German class. My German professor told it to me in German but I am unsure of the origin of the riddle.

Me: Can I hear it in German first?

JC: I can’t do it in German sorry. But basically, so, the idea is that, uh, so you come into a room right?

Me: right

JC: and there are two bodies on the floor, and one of the bodies is Jim and one of the bodies is Sally. And, they’re lying in a pool of water and there is glass everywhere on the floor. And the murderer is also in the room. What happened?

Me: Am I the murderer?

JC: No

Me: Was it a suicide?

JC: No

Me: Is the murderer time?

JC: No

Me: Is the murderer water?

JC: No

Me: Is the murderer glass?

JC: No

Me: *I ask clarifying questions about the riddle*

Me: Is there anything else in the room? Like a chair or a window?

JC: Its like a normal room, like a house

Me: Is the murderer a person

JC: No

Me: Is the murderer a living being?

JC: Yes

Me: Are there any fish in the room?

JC: Yes!

Me: Are they poisonous?

JC: No

Me: Are they piranhas or sharks?

JC: No

Me: Did the fish kill the people?

JC: No, did I say it was people?

Me: Oh, no…

JC: It was just two bodies right?

Me; I give up what’s the answer?

JC: So the bodies on the floor are two fish. And the murderer is a cat and he knocked the bowl off of the table. So the whole trick is that you’re supposed to think it was two people, but its actually two goldfish.

Context:
JC and I are in the same discussion section for our class, and we decided to share riddles to help us with our projects. We both shared the first riddles we could think of, and it seemed like this was the most recent on that JC had been told.

Thoughts/Analysis:
This riddle definitely relies on our thoughts of what a body could be. When looking at two dead fish, I would never consider them to be “bodies” as that is a term I would typically reserve for a dead human. However, the riddle works on the technical level that the dead fish are “bodies” and so by subverting my expectation for what a “body” was supposed to mean I was unable to get the answer to the riddle. If the origin of the riddle is, in fact, German, then perhaps it says something about the German perspective on both human and non-human life in that it treats the death of animals and humans relatively equally.