Riddle: A type of enigmatic interrogative routine characterized by a proposition (that is,
an implied or stated question), posed by the riddler (the initiating participant). The
proposition is intended to call forth a reply from the respondent (the riddler’s
coparticipant). The respondent’s reply is verbal and is oriented toward the proposition’s
solution. Roger D.Abrahams and Alan Dundes have noted that riddles are “framed with
the purpose of confusing or testing die wits of those who do not know the answer”
(Abrahams and Dundes 1972:130). The basic interactional unit of riddling is the riddle
act, which consists of all of the interactional moves involved in posing, responding to,
and providing the answer to a riddle proposition. Riddle-act organization can vary
depending on the traditions of the culture or group involved as well as on the situational
circumstances of the particular riddling encounter. However, the following sequence of
moves appears to be typical: (1) the riddle-act invitation (for example, “I’ve got one”);
(2) the riddler’s proposition (“What goes up when the rain comes down?”); (3) the
respondent’s initial response (offering a guess); (4) any riddlerrespondent interaction
during the contemplation period (requests for, and the supplying of, hints), and (5) the
riddle answer sequence (which includes the supplying of an answer [such as “Your
umbrella”] and confirmations of, or challenges to, that answer as the “correct” solution).
Riddles of various kinds are widespread across the world and throughout history.
Generally speaking, they are traditional within the cultural group in which they are used.
Charles Francis Potter has discussed riddles from historical and comparativist
perspectives (Potter 1972). The present discussion surveys some of the situational and
interactional contexts of riddling, common rhetorical strategies found in Englishlanguage
riddles, some of the types of riddles, and some of the ways in which riddles have been
studied.
Situational and interactional contexts as well as the appropriate personnel of riddling
vary according to cultural and group values. However, the social situations in which
riddles are told often develop as riddle sessions (a type of social interaction consisting of
a series of riddles, possibly interspersed with other performative and/or conversational
material). Some riddle sessions are restricted to adult riddlers and respondents (though it
does appear that adult riddling is relatively rare in mainstream American society). In
“The Turtles’” initiation rite, which is often conducted in bars and other public drinking
areas, a previously initiated Turtle member (often male) asks a potential respondent
(often female): “Are you a Turtle?” If the respondent does not give the appropriate ritual
response (which is “You bet your sweet ass I am!”), the respondent is expected either to
buy the riddler a drink or to submit to the asking of four potentially embarrassing riddles:
(1) “What is it a man can do standing, a woman sitting down, and a dog on three legs?—
Shake hands”; (2) “What is it a cow has four of and a woman has only two of?—Legs”;
(3) “What is a four-letter word ending in K that means the same as intercourse?—Talk”;
and (4) “What is it on a man that is round, hard, and sticks so far out of his pajamas you
can hang a hat on it?—His head.” In contrast, riddling in other types of session can
involve both adults and youngsters.
In pedagogic riddling, the adult takes on the role of teacher; the child, the role of
student. For example, in some Ozark mountain homes of the 1930s, parents regarded
children’s “workin’ out [the answers to] riddles” as an appropriate intellectual discipline.
For its part, adult-child leisure-time riddling (during which riddling is pursued primarily
or ostensibly for entertainment) can develop between parents and youngsters as a way of
relieving monotony—for instance, during long car trips or in the home during the joint
execution of household chores. Finally, leisure-time sessions can be restricted to children
only. This may be the most frequently occurring type of riddling interaction in the United
States in the late 20th century. Children’s riddling can develop on the playground during
recess, in the cafeteria at lunchtime, on the school bus, or in neighborhood backyards.
Because adult supervision in these areas is typically distant enough to permit children’s
peergroup interests to hold sway, youngsters often engage in what John Holmes
McDowell has called contentious riddling—that is, riddling in which participants are
verbally aggressive, take liberties with one another, and repeatedly test each other’s
social competence (McDowell 1979). These sessions can be organizationally diffuse as
the children variously engage in riddling per se, knock-knock routines, narratives, songs,
name-calling, obscenities, and a variety of victimization procedures.
In their phrasing, riddles point to some of the interpretive work the respondent is
expected to do. At a basic level, this work involves the respondent’s coping with a
riddle’s use of one or more common rhetorical strategies. Verbal riddles employing
description present information about the appearance, qualities, activities, or nature of
some entity, phenomenon, or event (“What has teeth but no mouth?—A comb”).
Descriptive propositions are also found in the word charade, a riddle whose proposition
divides the answer as a word into syllables and gives a description of each:
My first drives a horse,
My second is needy,
My third is a nickname,
My whole is a bird.
Answer—Whip-poor-will.
As a second strategy, riddles can depend on the use of either comparison (“Why is an
alligator like a sheet of music?—Because they both have scales”) or contrast (“What’s
the difference between a flea and an elephant?—An elephant can have fleas, but a flea
can’t have elephants”). A third strategy is that of narration. In the following, the riddle
proposition and its answer each tell small stories:
Whitey saw Whitey in Whitey.
Whitey sent Whitey to drive Whitey out of Whitey.
Answer—Mr. White sent a white dog to drive a white
cow out of his cotton field.
Fourth, riddles using definition fall into at least three groups: (1) riddles that ask for a
definition (“What’s the defmition of a skeleton?—A striptease gone too far”); (2) riddles
that involve negative definition—that is, the proposition identifies a category (such as
doors, but then immediately indicates that category’s inefficiency relative to a particular
member (“When is a door not a door?—When it’s a jar [ajar]”; and (3) riddles whose
proposition provides a definition and asks for the defined term (“What kind of bow can
you never tie?—A rainbow”). The two nonverbal riddle types summarized here rely on
the strategy of description. Gestural riddles often depend on gestural description as part
of their proposition: (“Hold your hands over your head, wriggle your fingers, and ask,
‘What’s this?’—A midget playing a piano”).
Visual descriptive riddles (called droodles in the 1950s) use a hand-drawn sketch as
the descriptive segment of their proposition. For example, consider this sketch, which
would be accompanied by the riddler’s asking, “What is it?”:
The answer is “A ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch.”
Riddle types have also been distinguished in terms of expectations about their
difficulty of solution. Generally speaking, folklorists have called riddles “true” if their
answers can be reasoned out, based on information supplied in the riddle proposition and
on the respondent’s adequate experience with, and recall of, tropes, symbols, and other
relevant conventions shared within the particular culture. In terms of rhetorical strategies,
the true riddle employs description and comparison. In the following true riddle, the
proposition describes a stronghold containing gold. The answer makes possible a
comparison between the stronghold, the gold, and an egg:
In marble walls as white as milk,
Lined with skin as soft as silk,
Within a crystal fountain clear,
A golden apple doth appear.
No doors there are to this stronghold
Yet thieves break in to steal the gold.
Answer—An egg.
True riddles have garnered extensive attention in literature (for example, Taylor 1951). In
contrast, the answers to other types of riddle are usually regarded as somewhat to very arbitrary. At the “somewhat arbitrary” end of the spectrum is the conundrum—that is, a
riddle based on punning or on other word play. The punning may occur in the proposition
(“What has four wheels and flies?—A garbage truck”) or in the answer (“What kind of
money do people eat?—Dough”). In the relatively arbitrary riddle joke, the proposition
serves as a setup for the punch-line answer (“What’s tall and says ‘eef eif eof muf’?—A
backward giant” or “How do you confuse a Polack?—Put him in a round room and ask
him to stand in the corner”). Riddle jokes often run in topical cycles (such as dead-baby
jokes or dumb-blondjokes) and, through stereotyping, may poke fun at a specific ethnic
group (as in Polack jokes) or at a group with a particular medical condition (as in AIDS
jokes or Alzheimer’s disease jokes). Parody riddle jokes extend the humor and
arbitrariness of riddle jokes into absurdity and nonsense. What marks them as extensions
is the degree of violence they do to mainstream assumptions of what can happen in the
everyday, “real” world (“Why do elephants have flat feet?—From jumping out of palm
trees”).
In catch riddles, the proposition sets up the respondent for some sort of victimization.
For example, the catch riddle:
A: What’s red, purple, green, yellow, gray, sky-blue, and green?
B: I don’t know.
A: I don’t know either, that’s why I’m asking you.
tries to “catch” the respondent in the conventional assumption that riddlers already know
the answer to the riddle propositions they pose. In the type of catch riddle known as the
pretended obscene riddle, the riddler tries to prompt the respondent into saying (or at
least thinking) about something sexual or otherwise risqué (“What word starts with F and
ends with CK?—Firetruck”). For their part, the answers to gestural riddles and to visual
descriptive riddles are usually difficult to guess. Because there exist no widely accepted
systems for interpreting either gestures or individual graphic lines, squiggles, or dots,
answers in both of diese riddle types are typically quite arbitrary. For example, in
addition to the answer (“A ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch”) given with
the visual riddle sketch presented above, that sketch can also be described by the answer
“A woman sitting down with her legs crossed.”
Riddles can be studied in a variety of ways. Some studies have considered riddles’ use
of the riddle block—that is, those aspects of the riddle that interfere with the flow of
information, thereby complicating the respondent’s attempts to figure out the answer.
Abrahams (as summarized in Abrahams and Dundes 1972) has given four techniques by
which the image (or Gestati) offered by the proposition can be impaired:
1. Opposition: The component parts of the presented image do not harmonize (“What has
eyes but cannot see?—A potato”).
2. Incomplete detail: Not enough information is given for the provided image parts to fit
together in a recognizable image (“What is white, then green, then red?—A berry
growing”).
3. Too much detail: Inconsequential details bury the important traits, or misleading
information diverts attention from them (“As I was crossing London Bridge, I met a
man who tipped his hat and drew his cane, and now I gave you his name. What is
it?—Andrew Cane”).
4. False image: The details provided suggest an obvious answer; however, that answer is
not only “wrong” but is also possibly “off-color” and, therefore, embarrassing (as in
pretended obscene riddles such as “What’s long and hard and contains semen
[seamen] ?—A submarine”).
W.J.Pepicello and Thomas A.Green have considered various riddle blocks that foster
different kinds of ambiguity (Pepicello and Green 1984), including linguistic ambiguity
and metaphoric ambiguity. Linguistic ambiguity yields multiple linguistically based
meanings for an utterance. An example, based on aspects of phonology (the intonational
stress and pauses between words) is found in the riddle “What bird is lowest in spirits?—
A bluebird,” which exploits the meaning of “bluebird” (a species of bird) and the
meaning of a “blue bird” (an emotionally sad bird). Metaphoric ambiguity fosters
multiple metaphorically based frames of reference. An example is found in the riddle
“There is something with a heart in its head.—A peach” in that the primary metaphor
heart refers both to the bodily organ known as a heart and to a fruit pit that is shaped like
the bodily organ.
Riddling has been considered in terms of its structure of context, which David Evans
(in Köngäs-Maranda 1976) has discussed as the structuring of a session not only in terms
of the interactional relationships emergent among its participants, but also in terms of the
developed interrelationships obtaining among the riddles presented (as in riddle
sequencing). Riddling has also been approached in terms of the functions it serves for its
participants. McDowell, for example, has pointed to various socialization functions
served in children’s riddling (such as youngsters’ acquisition of an artistic competence,
their augmentation of sociability and interactional skills, and their exercise of skills
concerning the assertion of self) (McDowell 1979). The final area of research to be
mentioned here concerns children’s developmental acquisition of competence in riddling.
Richard Bauman and McDowell provide useful analyses of acquisition parameters,
including discussions of children’s made-up riddle routines (Bauman 1977; McDowell
1979).
Puzzle: A type of enigmatic interrogative routine characterized by a proposition
(consisting of, or including, a question) that describes a problem. The puzzler (the
initiating participant) offers the proposition, which is intended to call forth a reply from
the respondent. This reply, which may be verbal or behavioral, is oriented toward the
problem’s solution. Puzzles tend to be traditional within the culture or group in which
they are used. Unfortunately, there has been little analytic work done on puzzles,
particularly in either distinguishing them from riddles or in arguing in detail that they are
indeed a subset of riddles. As treated here, puzzles are interactional forms. As such,
puzzle-act organization is analogous to riddle-act organization.
Abrahams and Dundes have suggested that there are two major teleological categories
of puzzle: (1) puzzles whose proposition presents a problem and then asks for its
solution, and (2) puzzles whose proposition presents a problem as well as its solution and
then asks how that solution was derived (Abrahams and Dundes 1972). An example of
the first category—puzzles that offer a problem and request its solution—is the following
narrative puzzle:
Two boys, each weighing 100 pounds, and their father, weighing 200
pounds, wanted to cross the river in a boat that could carry only 200
pounds at a time. How did they accomplish this? Answer—The two boys
go across and one boy brings back the boat to his father. The father goes
across, and the boy that was left brings back the boat to the boy on the
other side. Then both boys cross over and join their father.
Another member of this category is the genealogical puzzle:
Brothers and sisters have I none,
But that man’s father is my father’s son.
Who is he?
Answer—The speaker s [I’s] son.