Category Archives: Riddle

Kingdom Race

Nationality: Arab American
Age: 20
Residence: Glendale, CA
Performance Date: April 19, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Arabic

Form of Folklore:  Folk Speech (Riddle)

Informant Bio:  The informant was born and raised in Glendale, California.  Most of the folklore he has been exposed to comes primarily from his father, who is of Arabic decent.  Other folklore has been attained either through media sources (i.e. Reddit) or through personal life experiences in America.

Context:  The interview was conducted on the porch of another informant’s house in the presence of two other informants

Item:    A king of a land has two sons and he’s slowly dying.  He tells his sons that one of them will inherit the thrown but to do so they’re gonna have a competition; they’re gonna race each other.  He gives them both horses and tells them, “The last horse to show up to the finish line will get to inherit the throne.”  So the two brothers… they get on the horses and they both start racing as fast as they can, and they both want the throne.  How is this possible?

The answer is that they got on the other person’s horse and they raced.  So whoever showed up first (whoever was riding that horse) would actually be the winner… because their horse showed up next.

Informant Comments:  The informant’s father told him this riddle.  He believes it is most likely rooted in some sort of truth; the thought being that there could have been a king who asked his sons to race for the thrown, but most likely did not say that the looser of the race would be the winner of the kingdom.  Whether the riddle is based in truth or not, the informant believes this riddle is an entertaining folklore to help pleasantly pass time with friends and family.

Analysis:  This riddle, unlike most, is built from a mini-narrative.  The beginning presents a problem:  the king is dying and the next king must be determined.  The solution to this problem is a horse race, but it is left to the listener to determine how it is possible for the two sons to want the thrown and yet try to have the horse they are on finish first (when the owner of the last horse will be the next king).  Having this riddle presented in a possibly real scenario makes the listener feel as though they may be faced with a riddle similar to this one in real life.

Joke: Theather humor

Nationality: American-White
Age: 25
Occupation: Lab Administrator/ researcher
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 18 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Intermediate French

Joke

“What has two legs, a tail, and bleeds profusely?”

“Half a cat.”

My informant got this joke in high school. It was everyone’s favorite joke in her Theater class. Sometimes they would just text each other “Half a cat”. The informant says that she thought it was funny in an unexpected and twisted way.  It was mostly funny because it was an inside joke within the theater group. She said it in-jokes were in common in her theater class, they wouldn’t make sense to people outside the class.

This is kind of a joke riddle. The humor comes from the fact that the person thinks the answer is going to something they don’t know but then the answer is actually really simple. It actually reminds me of a joke from one of my favorite books How NOT to write a Novel “Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half of a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess ” (Mittelmark and Newman) Apparently in American society dead cats are a source of humor.

Plane Crash Joke

Nationality: United States
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/3/13
Primary Language: English

The informant grew up in Southern California and spent a lot of time in and around planes. His father is a pilot and he is also the first person who told him the joke. Although the inclusion of a plane is more of a device to produce humor, the joke could be considered a piece of pilot’s lore.

Informant: “Uhm…let’s see…alright. So, a plane crashes right on the border of the  U.S.-Canadian border. Right in the middle, no closer to one side than the other. Where do you bury the survivors?”

Interviewer: “Uh…wherever they’re from?”

Informant: “No”

Interviewer:”Um…I don’t know”

Informant: “You don’t bury them because they survived”

The informant was told this joke by his father when he was a young child. He calls it a “gotcha” joke because it is actually a very simple, straightforward question disguised as a clever riddle. When it is asked, one does not initially think that there is anything humorous about the riddle; the answer seems to be a logistical question about the burying the dead. When the answer is revealed  the person being told the joke is supposed to be embarrassed that he or she was unable to answer this easy question. The informant remembers being fooled by it the first time his father told it to him, and that feeling of being “had” stayed with him, imprinting the joke in his memory. Although it does deal with death, the riddle’s impact does not come entirely from the incongruity of morbidity and humor, but rather the incongruity of being stumped by a question anyone should be able to answer. Everyone knows that survivors are not buried; the way it is phrased leads one to overlook this fact in favor of a more complicated answer.

Octopodes

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student, fast food employee
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/27/13
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

In the following, my informant details an interesting fact he has heard regarding the plural pronunciation of the word “Octopus.”

So in the English language, the most common form of, the plural form, of “Octopus,” is like “Octopi,” people say a lot, or like “Octopuses,” um, or like “Octopodes,” [Ahct- oh – podes]  is actually what people say all the time, but if you actually like linguistically study it, the word “Octopus” is a Greek word, and “Octopi” is a like Latin rooted term I guess, I don’t know I’m not a linguist, but so that doesn’t… it’s actually not correct: The actual form is “Octopodes” [Ahct- oh – podes] because that’s Greek, but if you really think about it, it’s not pronounced Octopodes, [Ahct- oh – podes] because it’s Greek it’s pronounced Octopodes, [Ahct – tahp – ode – eis] which is the coolest thing ever, so if you ever happen to see multiple Octopus, Octopodes, [Ahct – tahp – ode – eis] just bring it up to all your friends, because it is the best news they will ever hear.

My informant said that he heard this from a friend in his dance company, who in turn claimed to have read it on Facebook. Interestingly, the pronunciation of the plural form of Octopus, can be found in several places on line, such as http://www.infoplease.com/askeds/plural-octopus.html or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_form_of_words_ending_in_-us and is interesting insofar as the linguistics behind the Greek word Octopus have become something of a limerick/riddle in english. 

Pretended Obscene riddle

Nationality: White
Age: 23
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 24, 2012
Primary Language: English

‘What’s brown and sticky?’

‘A stick!’

My informant is a camp counselor at Troy Camp at USC, and spends a lot of time with children. I asked him to tell me his favorite joke, and this is what he gave me. This is a good example of pretended obscene riddles and the kinds of ‘dirty jokes’ that are allowed to be performed by and around children without being too offensive or inappropriate. For the ‘dirty minded’—myself included—the riddle seems to be talking about poo, and the joke is that the answer is a very innocuous one. The effect here is that the listener feels embarrassed for having a dirty mind, but also can revel in being in on the joke’s dirty second implicit meaning that the performer is also aware of.

Jokes like this are very popular in children’s environments, because they are an acceptable way for the children to be silly and naughty without getting in trouble for what they say. This is also an example of the play-on-words aspect of riddles that is behind why many adults think that riddles are an adult game. In our society, children are very controlled and disempowered by adults and authority, which is why a pretended obscene riddle would be so popular among children, since it’s a clever way for them to push back against the authorities without getting in trouble, and it also is a way to exercise their smarts and show that they are just as witty or sharp as adults are.