Category Archives: Riddle

Riddle

Nationality: Portuguese, Irish German
Age: 18
Occupation: student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 22 April 2011
Primary Language: English

Portuguese, Irish, German

English

19, Student

Los Angeles, CA

24 April 2011

What word can be written forward, backward or upside down, and can still be read from left to right?

A: Noon

Brennan heard this riddle from his friend and it stuck with him because he prefers riddles that are possible to figure out. He doesn’t know where the riddle comes form but he has a certain way of performing it to confuse the victim. As Brennan tells the story, He speeds over the directions so that they get lost on the person, which makes it way harder to figure out. He said he learned how to stress unimportant elements and de-stress important ones to throw off the listener. This kind of control compliments the folklore of the riddle.

Riddles are interesting pieces of folklore. They are most often seen in liminal places and times because they break the ice and are acceptable at those occasions. This is a traditional riddle meaning one can figure out the answer from the question and it’s not trying to be too tricky. Riddles like this one need to be collected because they preserve the tradition of riddling. You can find riddles like this throughout history like the riddle the Egyptian Sphinx used to ask.

Tim Perille

18

1027 W. 34th St. Los Angele CA

Folk speech–riddle

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student, University of Southern California
Residence: Mission Viejo, CA
Performance Date: 27 April 2011
Primary Language: English

My source told me this riddle one night after a discussion of the riddles in The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien when we were trying to think up riddles of our own. She said that this riddle was one that her dad told her when she was about twelve. “It isn’t a very complex riddle, but I like it anyway,” she told me. “It’s one of those things where after you hear the answer, you’re mad at yourself for not getting it because of how easy and obvious it is.”

“The first man was in a car accident and was sent to the hospital, where he was in critical condition. When the second man came to see him, a nurse stopped the second man and told him that only family members were allowed to visit patients. ‘Are you a family member?’ the nurse asked. He answered with the following:

‘Brothers and sisters I have none,

But this man’s father is my father’s son.’

Do the nurses allow him in?”

Answer: Yes. The second man is the first man’s father, so he is allowed in.

I definitely had the same reaction that my informant described in her analysis of the riddle. I couldn’t get the answer, and after five minutes of wracking my brain trying to think of something that would make sense in this context, I still wasn’t able to think of anything and was getting increasingly frustrated. Once she told me the answer, I just felt stupid for not seeing it in the first place. This can be categorized as an “enigma riddle,” one that relies on flowery language to confuse the listener. It takes a careful thinker to see the answer to this riddle straight off, and I found that frustrating.

Riddle – American

Nationality: Caucasian American
Age: 41
Occupation: Storyteller
Residence: Westlake, Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 17, 2011
Primary Language: English
Language: Conversational Spanish, Conversational German

The informant learned the following riddle from his parents “years and years and years ago”:

“What’s black and white and red all over?” He gives several possible answers for the riddle, the first being the one his parents gave him (“A newspaper”). The others he mentioned were “a panda in a blender” and “a police car with a sunburn.” He claims to have “heard millions of variations on it, some of them more logical than others.”

The informant used to perform the riddle often as a child: “When I first learned it I told it to everybody I knew ’cause I thought it was hysterically funny at the time.” However, he almost never tells it any more.

The informant has great contempt for riddles in general: “I think it’s enormously stupid. I think most riddles are, especially the one that kids tell, are ultimately, uh, sort of the weakest form of humor possible.” He does make a distinction, however, between children’s riddles and adult riddles: “Riddles in my mind are either more pun-type riddles, in which case they’re usually, uh, they’re usually kid based in the sense of, uh, of they’re playing around with the idea that your brain thinks in one way and it’s actually being tricked; or they’re the more traditional riddles such as the one that the sphinx tells and stuff, that are much more about human condition, and those, I think, are riddles that adults, if they tell them at all, it will be adults telling each other because kids won’t understand them.”

The first answer to the riddle that the informant gives makes of it a “true riddle”—that is, there is an obvious answer to the question if the listener thinks about it in a different way, the pun being on the word “read” as a homophone for “red.” The police car answer seems like a deliberate attempt to be ridiculous, since it is obvious that a car cannot get a sunburn, but the panda answer is an obvious bid for shock value—since pandas are both “cute” and endangered, many listeners could be shocked and appalled at that answer. Clearly, from the informant’s assertion that he has heard many versions of the riddle, it has both multiplicity and variation. Archer Taylor recorded the riddle with the newspaper answer in his book English Riddles from Oral Tradition in 1951 (624).

Source:

Taylor, Archer. English Riddles from Oral Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951.

Catch Riddle

Nationality: Caucasian with Irish and Italian ancestry
Age: 29
Occupation: English Student
Residence: Tujunga, Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 19, 2011
Primary Language: English
Language: Conversational Spanish

The informant learned the following catch riddle from his peers in elementary school:

“Does your mom know you’re gay?”

The informant’s comment on why the riddle is funny was that “No matter how they answer, they’ve clearly admitted to being gay.” He says that he performed in primary school but seldom does so any more because he no longer finds it amusing.

The informant regards riddles as “a childish thing in general . . . as an adult, people just look at you strange if you [say] something like that.” He calls this riddle in particular “a stupid kid joke” because “it’s not like anyone’s going to go with a verbal agreement.” However, he also made an assertion that seems to contradict his contempt for the riddle: “If I talked to a magic machine that was like the reverse of Tom Hanks’s Big and sent me back in time to elementary school, I would totally do that to some of the little bitches.”

It is interesting that the informant previously viewed the riddle from an emic perspective and has switched to an etic perspective now that he is out of elementary school–he is no longer part of that folk group. The informant’s assessment that very few people would assent to give a definitive answer to the riddle is most likely correct, and in Los Angeles, which, according to the scientific journal Demography, had in 2000 the second-largest gay population of any city in America (by number, not percentage), there is likely not as much of a stigma attached to being gay as in other places, though homosexuality has certainly gained acceptance since 1991, when the informant left elementary school. Nonetheless, many people who are not homosexual do get offended when it is intimated that they are, which might be perceived as amusing to active bearers of this joke.

Source: Black, Dan, Gary Gates, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor. “Demographics of the Gay and Lesbian Population in the United States: Evidence from Available Systematic Data Sources.” Demography 37 (2000): 139-154.

Jokes/Riddles

Nationality: American
Age: 50s
Occupation: Drama Teacher
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/23/11
Primary Language: English

The informant is a caucasian female in her 50s. She was born in Southern California to an upper middle class family. The informant was raised presbyterian, but now professes to follow no religion. She attended Stanford University and then settled back in Los Angeles. She works part-time as a high school drama teacher. The informant is married with one child.

The informant learned these joke riddles as a child in the 1960s. In her youth she would retell them to her friends and family frequently. She considers them to be riddles and will supply them if anyone asks for a riddle, even to this day. She remembered these examples specifically because they have interesting and unexpected answers and made her laugh as a child. She says that she was not able to guess the answers to any of these three and that prompted her to remember and retell them.

Text:

What do you loose every time you stand up?    Your lap.

Why do birds fly south?    Because its too far to walk.

When you throw a white hat into the red sea, what does it become?    Wet.

Analysis: It is interesting that the informant still tells these childhood jokes/riddles when well in adulthood. Her fascination with the unexpected answers has transferred these examples into long term memory. It is the subversion of the expected answer type, replacing it with the unusual and ridiculous, that intrigued the informant as a child. This aspect of subverting the norm is common in children’s folklore, representing the exploration of boundaries through the safe means on jokes, songs, stories, etc. While these jokes represent a very mild version of such a rebellion, there is still present a slight twist that pushes against how the mind is taught to think when posed such questions. That the informant remembered these jokes to this day indicates that the resonance she had with the unexpected and surprising nature of these examples. That she still retells them today perhaps indicates that, even as an adult, she is still drawn to the slightly subversive nature of these jokes.