Category Archives: Riddle

American Riddle

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: University of Southern California
Performance Date: 2/28/15
Primary Language: English

Riddle: At night they come without being fetched, and by day they are lost without being stolen.

Answer: Stars

            My friend said that he heard this riddle in elementary school from a friend of his who heard it from his mother. He recalls that his friend fittingly told him this when they went on a fieldtrip to the Griffith Park Observatory. Both the informant and his friend don’t know the origins of this particular riddle. The riddle is rather simple, and doesn’t require quite as much thought as other riddles out there.

When I was younger, I heard a variation of this riddle, though the question part of the riddle was very similarly phrased. Instead of the answer being “stars,” the answer was a “shooting star.” I heard this particular riddle from my uncle. When I was younger, I would sometimes let myself sit for hours while trying to figure out riddles, with this being no exception. I would detest when my uncle would give away the answer. This particular riddle is almost pretty to me though, as I find the night sky both beautiful and fascinating.

Halloween House

Nationality: American
Age: 16
Occupation: Student
Residence: Memphis, TN
Performance Date: March 21, 2015
Primary Language: English

The riddle:

Informant: “It was a dark, Halloween night, and a boy was walking alone. There was a house with no power, like in the woods, in the back of the woods, like there was a pathway up to the house, there was no power. And he went in alone, and he goes, and he was walking through it all, and he kept on hearing creaky sounds, and then he finally got to the back, and this voice over the house just was like, ‘You walked into this house, and now you have to die,’ and he said, ‘but I’ll give you five choices on how to die.’ And it was like, ‘You can take a pill, and you won’t feel anything at all, and you’ll just die peacefully. Or you can, um, I can cut your neck off’…there are like two other ways, I can’t remember, and then, um…oh and then, ‘You can sit in a rocking chair and you’ll die by the…electric chair.’ And he…what would you have chosen? The pill where you don’t feel anything?”

Informant’s mom: “No, or the electric chair, or what?”

Informant: “Getting your head chopped off.”

Informant’s mom: “I don’t know, I wouldn’t do the pill, because I would think that I might have a chance to escape. So I wouldn’t do that.”

Informant: “Alright, well, he picked the pill, but if he would’ve picked the electric chair, he wouldn’t’ve died, because remember at the beginning, I said there was no power.”

Informant’s mom: “Ohhhhh (laughs).”

 

The informant, a sophomore in high school, told this to her mother. She says that she learned this from a classmate in second grade. The riddle doesn’t seem to be that clever, but I think it was probably very clever for second graders once they knew the right answer. It probably amused them while also skirting around the taboo of death and violence at such a young age. While effectively harmless, it was fun for young children to sort of trick one another.

Knock Knocks and Armless Timmy

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/03/15
Primary Language: English

Informant: Why did Timmy fall off the swing?

Collector: Why?

Informant: Because he had no arms.

Collector: Oh and then the “Knock knock. Who’s there? Not Timmy!”

Informant: Yeah! Also, say “knock knock.”

Collector: Knock knock.

Informant: Who’s there?

Collector: Who? Oh wait, what? Oh!

Informant: Yeah! That one’s just awkward.

Collector’s Notes: In class, we learned about the growing popularity of anti-jokes, and I think is probably the most common one I’ve heard.  It was cool how the Informant and I were able to add to the joke together and make it a two-sided joke.  It’s interesting that this particular joke, always a swing and always Timmy, is also almost always followed up with the knock-knock anti-joke.  It’s like it’s two-parted.  A young child with no arms is not funny at all, but I think it is a way that we address serious things with humor.  The fact that someone without arms can’t do all of the everyday things that we do is really sad and hard for some people to talk about without it becoming awkward.  This jokes eases some of that tension.

A type of riddle we talked about in class was the “catch” riddle, in which you trick someone into saying the wrong thing.  Most times, it’s supposed to insinuate something inappropriate.  An example that I know off-hand is “What’s brown and sticky?” which makes it seem like the person is supposed to say “Poop,” when actually, the answer is “a stick.”  The Informant’s second joke reminded me of that.  It tricks the person being told to joke into saying something that they’re not supposed to say, therefore putting them in the awkward position of suddenly becoming the joke-teller instead of receiver.

 

Choking Doberman

Treat is a new friend of mine. We shared two classes this semester. He’s a sophomore transferring from Norwich University. He is in the same NROTC unit I’m in here at USC. He’s lived in some very interesting places like Italy and the Netherlands. They move around to such cool places because his father is in the military and that’s where his father got orders to. Treat really likes ghost stories and Mythology. It was not hard interviewing him in the least bit. He had stories I had never heard of or could’ve even imagined.

Treat, being a fan of horror and legends told me a story about a dog who choked on some fingers:

“A woman returned from work and found her large dog, a Doberman, lying on the floor breathing funny. So she immediately grabbed the dog and put him into her car and drove him to a vet. The vet looked at the dog but didn’t really find anything at first for the breathing problem…so he said that he’d have to perform a tracheotomy. That thing where you put the tubes down the animal’s throat so he could breathe. He told her that she shouldn’t watch, said the dog would stay the night and the she could go home.

When she got home, the phone was ringing off the hook. She answered it and it was the vet. He yelled into the phone: “Get out of the house immediately! Call the police!” When the vet performed the operation, he found a three fingers were stuck in its throat. He thought the fingers may have come from some dead person in the house.
The police came and found a dead man in a closet with out fingers.
Analysis: The question is…why do stories like this exist. It serves little purpose. Is the message “don’t leave your dog home alone.” Or “get better alarm systems”? There are many variations to this story, sometimes the dog chokes on the genitals of the man, sometimes the dog dies.

If it looks like paint and smells like paint..

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/17/2014
Primary Language: English

Zach, my friend and fellow sophomore at USC, is one of the most intelligent individuals I know yet simultaneously has one of the strangest senses of humor I’ve ever come across. He introduced me to a category of humor I had never heard of: the anti-joke. When asked for his favorite, he refused to pick one, claiming “there are too many to choose one.” I chose three of my favorites from the multitudes he listed off.

 

Informant:

Zach: “What’s red and smells like blue paint?”

Me: “What.”

Zach: “Red paint.”

 

Zach: “What did Batman say to Robin before they got in the car.”

Me: “What.”

Zach: “Get in the car.”

 

Zach: “What would George Washington do if he were alive today?”

Me: “What.”

Zach: “Scream and scratch at the top of his coffin.”

 

 

Analysis:

These statements are in no way humorous. Instead, the anti-joke is a type of indirect humor that involves the joke-teller delivering something which is deliberately not funny. By setting itself up in the traditional form of a joke, the anti-joke builds the audience’s expectation for a funny punchline, toys with this expectation by instead delivering the most logical answer to the original question. Without this expectation, the anti-joke would be not be a category of humor at all. Yet the irony of the answer being so obvious and not funny is what provides the comedic value.

Personally, I didn’t understand the appeal of the anti-joke or other similar alternative forms of comedy for a long time. It wasn’t funny, and that’s the point of humor, right? However, once I understood that the purpose isn’t to be funny per say, but to invert expectations and parody the traditional idea of the joke, I found myself laughing along with every single one of the jokes that Zach was rattling off for their blatant non-attempt to be funny.