Category Archives: Riddle

“Ikau” Pun

Nationality: American/Filipino
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: California
Performance Date: 04/27/15
Primary Language: English
Language: Tagalog

The informant is a fellow student and a good friend. While going out for smoothies, she shared her Filipino culture with me.

“I’m going to give you a heads up, so ‘ikau’ mean ‘you.’ So they would say, ‘What’s an example of an ugly cow?’ And then someone would say, ‘what?’ And then they would be like, ‘IKAU!’

Background & Analysis

The informant thinks this joke is really corny, but she still uses it with other Filipino people a lot. She learned it from Filipino friends in grade school, who had probably heard it from older brothers and sisters.

This is a more contemporary joke, because it’s in english, but makes use of a pun in tagalog. This joke most likely then originated among subsequent Filipino-American generation children here in the U.S.

Cinderella Jumping Rope Rhyme

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 04/27/15
Primary Language: English
Language: french

The informant is 20-years old and finishing her sophomore year at USC. She is a Business and Music Industry Major, is involved in several on-campus organizations such as Concerts Committees. When she’s not doing her school work or work for clubs, she enjoys running, taking hikes, and going to concerts. She grew up in Washington with her mom, dad, and two younger sisters.

 

Informant: “I guess something I learned from other people would be jump roping rhymes. I was super into jump roping with my friends when I was in elementary school. Even into middle school we would play Double Dutch. It’s just an easy thing to play—jump-roping. Like all we needed to have with us was the rope.”

 

Interviewer: “Do you have a favorite rhyme you want to share?”

 

Informant: “I wouldn’t say I have a favorite…But one I think is really weird. Haha. Probably the most bizarre rhyme that circulated around is one about Cinderella. We would sing:

‘Cinderella dressed in yellow

Went downstairs to kiss her fellow

On the way her girdle busted,

How many people were disgusted?’

And then you’d count off 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. Until whoever was jumping rope tripped. And then the song would start all over again.

 

Thoughts: It’s funny that my informant learned this Cinderella rhyme for jumping rope in Washington because I learned the same one in the suburb of Chicago where I grew up. I remember seeing some kids recite it while jump roping, but where I heard it the most was in the figure skating community. I figure skated for ten years and when we had shows, all of the younger kids would convene in a sort of backstage/holding area when we weren’t on the ice. We used to play all sorts of games to pass the time and one game was a one where everyone sat in a circle with their hands touching and we would go around the circle as we sang this song slapping the person’s hand next to us, and when we got to 10, the person whose hand was slapped got out. This seems like a good example of how folklore travels, or of polygenesis, and how it attains different uses and practices as it is spread.

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.