Tag Archives: Riddle

Plane dead

Nationality: American
Age: -
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: Feb 2023
Primary Language: English
Language: -

Q: Ok so do you have the joke or riddle or what is it.

R: Its a riddle

Q: Wait so where did you hear it?

R: I heard it in Southern California at a summer Camp I was at

Q: ok so what is the riddle

R: Ok so there is a cabin in the woods and there are 26 people dead inside. There are no track coming or going from te cabin, what happened?

Q: Um maybe it snowed and the snow melted

R: No

Q: Was it an accident or were they murdered

R: It was an accident

Q: They were there a long time

R: Maybe but that doesnt matter 

Q: I dont know, what happened

R: It was the cabin of a plane and they died in a crash

Context: As the informant said this was collected at summer camp at middle school age in southern California. 


Analysis: This joke definitely came into being after the invention of airplanes and so post 1903 for sure although most likely further after that. As well, this is a joke that makes me think immediately about the genre of dark humor. This is something discussed in great detail in Peter Narvaez in his book Of Corpse. His analysis of the timeline of when it is appropriate to tell a joke like this is interesting to me as I know someone who’s father died in a plane accident and would be highly offended if they heard this joke. On the other hand I know people like Pete Davidson who gets jokes made about his father dying on 9/11 and laughs along. In this regard it would seem to be a personal thing and how each individual deals with trauma.

Candle Riddle

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Salt Lake City
Performance Date: February 22, 2023
Primary Language: English

“I am born tall but I die very short
My only purpose is inside the house
What am I?

A candle”

This is a riddle that my informant told me about. She first heard it from her uncle when he used it to make fun of his sister (Informant’s mother) because she was “too short to be as hot headed as she is”. Some variation of the riddle or punchline is used in the household whenever someone is being too hot headed.

When I first heard the riddle, I thought it would be somehow linked to the sphynx’s riddle about man. I do not think there is enough information in the riddle to actually get the answer, making this more of an inside joke. I think there is a hidden message behind the riddle, warning the recipient to not be too hot headed/emotional or else they will burn faster.

Pinocchio Rebus

Nationality: American
Age: 71
Occupation: Retired
Residence: New York City
Performance Date: February 22, 2023
Primary Language: English

This is a rebus that consists of the image of a pin followed by an O, a key, and another O

My informant encountered this rebus at a school fair. It stuck with her because it was the one word puzzle, the type she loves, that she wasn’t able to solve. She found the answer by asking the person at the stall, which was Pinocchio.

The rebus in itself is pretty simple, all you need to do is say each part out loud and meld the words together into one. The difficulty comes from how simple it is. Most rebuses make you think about the positioning of the symbols, and the O’s can be misread as zeros.

Nun Riddle

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 48
Primary Language: English

Text: 

Q: “What’s black and white and black and white and black and white and black and white and red all over”

A: “A nun falling down the stairs” 

Context:

My aunt describes hearing this on the school bus riding to and from middle school. She mentions that sometimes the joke was preceded with the well known riddle, “what is black and white and red all over”, to which a classmate would answer, a “newspaper”. Then the asker would propose the above question. 

Analysis:

The above text is a cross between a riddle, and a dark joke in my interpretation. Going off of Oring’s argument, riddles question reality, disrupting the rigid categories we use to control the world. They transcend our perception of reality, which is an act of rebellion in itself. This riddle could certainly serve this purpose. An important factor beyond this interpretation, is that the joke/riddle was circulated among children. It’s a widely held folkloric idea that children’s folklore often rejects institutions. This is because children are so highly institutionalized on a day to day basis, especially in a school setting, where this joke/riddle was told. Another societal function that riddles serve in some cultures is to aid in education. Their structure is helpful for practicing memorization, and they provide an exercise in logical thought, as well as language manipulation. Interestingly, this joke subverts a well known riddle, to which the answer is “a newspaper”. I could see this subverted riddle emerging partly as a way of rejecting the institution that is public school, and its education tactics. Additionally, the subject of the joke/riddle is a nun. Nun’s are representative of yet another institution, one of Christianity. Of course there is also the basic factor of this joke being slightly gruesome and dark, referring to blood and injury. This could be an example of Narvaez’s idea of rebelling against societal pressure to mourn foreign tragedies. But it is also likely that children would gravitate towards gruesome or dark humor simply because it is not what the institution deems “school appropriate”. 

“Made You Say Pink”

Nationality: Asian-American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 2/14/2023
Primary Language: English

My informant (18), from Maryland, describes a riddle that she and her friends performed in middle school: “It’s not really a joke, but it’s more like a challenge, like a “are you dumb” challenge. So it’s like I bet I can make you say the color pink ‘okay’ okay so then you’re like ‘what’s the color of the sky?’ ‘Blue’ ‘What’s the color of this chair?’ ‘Brown’ ‘What’s the color of my hair?’ ‘Black’ ‘What’s the color of the grass?’ ‘green’ ‘Ha, I told you I could make you say green’ ‘no you didn’t, you told me you would make me say pink’ and that’s how you make them say pink”

“And so it’s like this little thing that my swim friends and I, back in the past, like middle school? We would just always perform this on each other to like try and get the other person and just to make them seem, you know, like it’s more of like one of those ‘stupid tests’”

The informant began by saying this was a joke, and then changed to calling it a challenge, and finally called it a “test”. I think this piece is actually a kind of riddle, because it tests the wits of the person it is performed on, but instead of wordplay, there is a “trick” meant to catch the subject. Because this is used within the informants team, it might imply that performing this trick affords the performer a kind of social capital in the group when they are successful, suggesting that intelligence is valued in the group.