Tag Archives: Riddle

Joke – What’s Black and White and Re(a)d All Over?

Nationality: Mexican-American (2nd. Gen)
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Downey, California
Performance Date: January 2007
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Q: What’s black and white and red all over?

A: A newspaper.

My informant first heard this riddle in third grade during a show and tell in her elementary school in Downey, CA.  Some of her classmates that did not have anything to show could just tell a joke they knew.  One of her classmates gave this riddle, and no one had been able to figure it out in her class.  A newspaper is certainly black and white, and it is “read” all over.  The children persistently thought what object could be the colors black, white, and “red,” so they were stumped.

Riddles like these are handy for entertainment purposes.  I believe that people tell such riddles because they would like to engage a crowd big or small.  When told a riddle, people are naturally inclined to solve it, and if they give up, they are eager to know the answer.  Usually the answer is a very simple one whereas people trying to solve the riddle looked too deeply into it.  That is also very entertaining when the answer turns out to be something that was so obvious, but they never thought it would be that easy.

 

Annotation: This riddle was in the 1995 movie “Batman Forever” in which the villain, the Riddler, played by actor Jim Carey asks this riddle.

Nationality: Singaporean Chinese
Occupation: Teacher
Residence: Singapore
Performance Date: April 2007
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: Hinghwa, Hokkien, Mandarin, Cantonese, English

照

Zhao

Shine

一个日本人，

yi ge ri ben ren

One Japanese Man

站在门口，

zhan zai men kou

Standing at the doorway

拿着一把刀，

na zhe yi ba dao

Holding a knife

杀了四个人。

sha le si ge ren

He kills four people

 

This was learned by my informant when she was growing up in Singapore in school, when she was about ten or eleven years of age. While she can’t quite recall who she learnt it from, she said it was rather useful for learning characters in Chinese.  It is in essence a word riddle, in which the bottom four lines would be told to the other person and the other person would try to guess what the word was.

Even though there is supposedly nothing meant by the content (morbid as it is), it is just there because it fits the word. However, when my informant was growing up during the 1950s and 60s in Singapore there was a great deal of resentment against the Japanese for WWII. The words of this riddle could originate as a subtle form of anti-Japanese rebellion or statement for the brutal acts that they performed in Singapore and most of South East and East Asia.

During World War II, it was very common for Japanese soldiers to enter houses indiscriminately and slaughter whole families for numerous trumped up charges, like being Chinese, or having a wife that the soldier found mildly attractive or even looking at them wrong. Therefore this might be a reflection of not only this anti-Japanese sentiment but also oppositional culture.

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

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.