Category Archives: Riddle

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.  

The Impossible Men and the Rabbit

Nationality: Slovenian
Age: 54
Occupation: electrical engineer
Residence: San Jose, CA
Performance Date: 2014-04-24
Language: Slovenian, English, German, Serbian, Greek

“Nekoč so šle trije počaci.

Eden je bil slep,

Drugi je bil nag,

Treti je bil hrom.

Slepi je zajca videl,

Hromi ga je ujel,

Nagi ga je pod srajso del.”

—

Translation:

“There once went three together slowly –

One was blind,

The second was naked,

The third was lame.

The Blind one saw a rabbit,

the Lame one caught it,

and the Naked one put it under his shirt.”

Born and raised in former Yugoslavia, what is now known as Slovenia, the informant was continuously exposed to folk traditions that originated and permeated this region. The informant knows very little about the origins of this joke, but he compares them to many of popular self-contradictory English limericks, such as “One bright day in the middle of the night . . . ” The translation into English really tarnishes its humor, as the cadence of the joke is broken. The rhyme scheme is also distroyed as the punchline of the original joke cleverly rhymes with the line before it. Slovenian also has this incredible quality of succinctness, whereby a speaker can use an adjective, such as “lame” or “blind,” and turn it into a noun, generating much of humor from this reductive address (i.e. a man who is naked becomes simply “the Naked”).

Albacore Riddle

Nationality: Vietnamese
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Huntington Beach, CA
Performance Date: 4/29/14
Primary Language: English
Language: Vietnamese

 

Albacore Riddle

Personal Background:

Lillian Tran is a 19 year old student at the University of California, Irvine studying journalism. She has grown up in a one hundred percent Vietnamese family, and is very proud of many traditions her family has.

Riddle:

There is one riddle she loves to tell since it is very difficult.

“A man who took a bite of an albacore sandwich, and then he started to cry. Why did he do that?”

The way this type of riddle works that the people who are answering it can only ask yes or no questions to the person who asked it. Through a series of questions, it turns out that the man is blind, and at one time, he was on a desert island with his friend and his wife. His friend had told him his wife had died and that they should eat the albacore they had. The man is crying because the albacore sandwich he is eating does not taste like the albacore he ate on island, meaning that he was not eating the albacore, but he was eating his wife, and he could not tell since he was blind.

Lillian first heard this riddle on Thanksgiving with her family. She had to sit at the kid’s table since she was younger. To pass the time, her cousins started telling her riddles. It scared her more than anything. She was afraid something like this could actually happen to her. It has made her afraid of albacore sandwiches ever since.

Analysis:

Riddles tend to not be very popular in the United States, and tend to be seen more for children. They really play on the power of words, and can have different meaning for different people. This is known as a “true riddle” since there are enough clues asked throughout that the person should be able to answer.

To me, this riddle is a way to stay connected with her family and to have a good time with her friends. It is a fun party trick to be able to come up with this riddle, and it can bring a conversation to the room. It is a way to get people in a room to converse when things get tense because everyone has to agree on questions to ask. Riddles are a fun way to play brain games and come up with games for everyone.

Deer Crossing

Nationality: White
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Huntington Beach, CA
Performance Date: 4/29/14
Primary Language: English

Deer Crossing

Personal Background:

My sister, Katie, is a senior in high school in Huntington Beach, California. She has been very involved with cross country and track and field in her school. She will be graduating this year, 2014, and will be studying art when she gets to college.

Joke:

There is one joke Katie uses whenever people ask for jokes.

Katie: What do you call a deer with no eyes?

Me: What?

Katie: No eye deer!

What makes this joke so important to my sister is that she heard it from my brother a few years ago, and she thought it was hilarious. She is not sure where he heard it, but it may have been on TV for from a little kid. What made it great was the fact that three of us would try to make each other laugh by saying the punch line in a new and funny ways. The more someone sounded like they were from the south, the better it was. The goal was to see who could be the funniest. They now use it as an inside joke or say it during awkward situations.

Analysis:

Jokes are a great way to spread folklore. They are all about speech, and how speech can be changed in order to get a different answer than what was originally thought. They are very similar to riddles in that sense.

To me, this joke is a way to keep the family connected. It keeps my brother, sister, and me close, even when we are all living in different places.