Tag Archives: Riddle

Scuba Diver Riddle

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: College student
Residence: USC
Performance Date: 2/14/2023
Primary Language: English

D is 19 years old, she’s a college student. She moved to California for high school, and has a large history with camping and hiking. She shared this trail game riddle she learned at summer camp in North Carolina when she was 11 or 12, though she’s also heard it multiple times while hiking. 

“You could call them detective riddles, but they’re all in the same genre of: someone presents a scenario and then the one who’s trying to figure it out is asking questions about the scenario until they get more and more details and they figure out the answer to the scenario. This one is known as the scuba diver riddle. The scenario is “a man is found in the middle of a burned down forest head to toe in scuba gear. There’s no trace of anyone else around him, no trace of how he got there, what happened?” From there people ask questions like “Is he wet? Yes or no. Is he alive?” Sometimes it takes 20 minutes, I’ve seen up to three days, it’s a great thing to play when you’re in the backcountry and really bored. The eventual answer is that the man is someone who was scuba diving, there was a forest fire miles and miles away from sea, and helicopter crews trying to stop the wild fire were collecting water in huge nets to carry over to the forest from the ocean. They picked up this scuba diver, dropped him on the forest fire, he died on impact.” 

This was a new brand of riddle that I hadn’t heard because it seems to be specific to those who go hiking or are out in nature for a long time. It seems like an excellent way to pass a lot of time. It’s really interesting how groups that spend a lot of time doing something repetitive like walking up a trail or camping will get creative to engage their minds over that long period of time. I wonder how far back games like these go. I imagine games like this have existed for a long time, because before cars people often had to walk very far to get to their destination if they were traveling somewhere new, like soldiers marching or people going on the Oregon Trial. I imagine humans have been creating these games for a long time, and they’ve morphed to suit modern audiences, as this riddle is terminus post quem helicopters and scuba gear existing. The informant also said that this riddle was used by adults to frustrate and keep kids busy, because kids like to ask a lot of questions. It seems like a good way to quench kid’s curiosity, because kids are endlessly curious.

Trial game riddle – Trains

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: College student
Residence: USC
Performance Date: 2/14/2023
Primary Language: English

D is 19 years old, she’s a college student. She heard a lot of trail games and riddles, and shared one that she learned on a camping trip in high school in California. She says that only people from California have ever recognized it. 

“There’s a riddle called trains. The riddle has one person who’s the teller, usually the teller knows the riddle and no one else knows it. Someone says “I’m going to tell you guys about a bunch of trains going to different places, and you have to figure out the pattern.” You have the guess the answer. If I were to say this riddle, I’d say “There’s uhh one train in Los Angeles, zero in San Francisco, there’s like uhh… uhh you could say there’s two trains in Utah. There’s uhh one train in Florida” and it keeps going like that. The answer to the riddle is that every time you say “uhh” in your leadup to the state, that’s how many trains there are.”

I recognized a familiar riddle that I had learned as a child in California, another one that leads you on a long confusing journey while people try to keep up with a pattern, but the answer ends up being something stupid. The informant said that people tried to think about letters or vowels, but the real answer is “just so stupid.” When it comes to riddles, some people want to solve them to see smart, especially once you get a bit older. You want to seem smarter than the kids who normally hear this riddle, so people think of really complex potential answers. In the end though, the answer is just something silly. People sometimes take themselves too seriously when playing silly games and riddles, trying to prove that they are smart and capable of figuring it out easily. Often it’s little kids who are able to get the answer because they’re not overthinking it. Riddles like this encourage people to get back to their childish roots.

Riddle – backpacks in the desert

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: waitress
Residence: California
Performance Date: 2/21/23
Primary Language: English

Text:

“Two men are in a desert and they both have backpacks on. One of the two is dead. The guy who is still alive has his backpack open and the guy who is dead has his backpack closed. What is in the man’s backpack who is dead?”


                        “A parachute.”

Context:

HW is a 20 year old who was born and raised in Southern California. She now works at a restaurant in the Southern California area. She originally heard this riddle from her grandfather when she was a kid. He used to give her riddles and would give her a dollar if she could come up with the right answer. My informant said “he wasn’t usually out all that much money. I usually only got them when I had heard it before.” I had met her for coffee where she told me this riddle.

Analysis:

This riddle has a typical structure. It asks a question after granting information, but not enough to totally understand where the riddle is going. Often, riddles even provide too much information to throw people off the right answer. In this riddle, you might think the desert is an important clue, but it really could be set almost anywhere. This riddle has a little bit of humor in it as well. Everyone may not find it funny because of its use of death as a comedic technique. The barrier to understand this riddle is relatively low because anyone who understands English and how parachutes work can understand it. However, the younger the audience is, the less likely it will be an appropriate riddle or one that could be understood. My informant cannot remember how old she was when she heard it, but she does know that she understood it once she heard the answer. Riddles are often given to children and told by children for fun and to test how clever someone is based on how good they are at solving them. Often though, people who have heard the riddle before are likely to get the answer, whereas if someone hears a riddle for the first time, it is much harder to get the answer right away.

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.