Category Archives: Riddle

Joke/Blason Populaire/True Riddle

Nationality: American
Age: 14
Occupation: Student
Residence: Mount Kisco, NY
Performance Date: April 16, 2011
Primary Language: English

“How long is a Chinese man’s name?” After the interlocutor’s response (unless there is none), the line is then repeated: “How long is a Chinese man’s name?” If the interlocutor still does not understand, this part may be restated with different intonation, making clear that the line is a direct statement, as opposed to a question: “How Long is a Chinese man’s name.”

The informant stated that he learned the above joke (and riddle) about two months ago from a friend who told him the joke on the school bus. He said that he would tell the joke to both friends and family and at no specific time. However, he would not tell it to Asian people that he did not know well. The informant thought that this was an unusual and “unique” type of joke and that it is funny.

When I heard this joke for the first time from the informant, I had the typical and expected response: “I don’t know, how long is it?” Then, when he repeated it for me again, I understood the structure and purpose of the joke. Like the informant stated, the joke is rather unusual and unique, owing to the fact that it makes use both of a group stereotype—namely, that Asians have what might seem to many Westerners an abrupt and odd form of nomenclature—and of a quasi true riddle structure in which the answer (here, precisely that there is no answer, or response which should be given) is contained in the question. This piece of folklore thus incorporates not only the generally pervasive genre of jokes in which people of nearly every age group participate, but also the scarcer genre of riddles, which is more commonly found among children (though the informant here is perhaps a few years past childhood) who, being themselves novice language users, take greater delight than many older individuals in the enigmatic applications of language so often found in riddles.

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.