Riddle in the context of "Sphinx"

A riddle joke, joke riddle, pseudo-joke or conundrum is a riddle that does not expect the asked person to know the answer, but rather constitutes a set-up to the humorous punch line of the joke.

It is one of the four major types of riddles, according to Nigel F. Barley. There are many cycles of jokes in the form of a conundrum, such as elephant jokes, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" and lightbulb jokes.

The Riddler (Edward Nigma, later Edward Nygma or Edward Nashton) is a supervillain appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. The character was created by Bill Finger and Dick Sprang, and debuted in Detective Comics #140 in October 1948. He has become one of the most enduring enemies of the superhero Batman and belongs to the collective of adversaries that make up his rogues gallery.

In his comic book appearances, the Riddler is depicted as a criminal mastermind in Gotham City. He has an obsessive compulsion to incorporate riddles, puzzles, and death traps in his schemes to prove his intellectual superiority over Batman and the police. His real name—Edward Nigma—is a pun itself; an "enigma" is a person or thing that is difficult to understand. With this self-conscious use of an elaborate gimmick, the Riddler's crimes are often theatrical and ostentatious. The character commonly wears a domino mask and either a green unitard decorated with question mark prints or a green suit and bowler hat. A black, green, or purple question mark serves as his visual motif. He commonly says "Riddle me this", before stating his iconic riddles.

Humpty Dumpty is a character in an English nursery rhyme, probably originally a riddle, and is typically portrayed as an anthropomorphic egg, though he is not explicitly described as such. The first recorded versions of the rhyme date from late eighteenth-century England and the tune from 1870 in James William Elliott's National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs. Its origins are obscure, and several theories have been advanced to suggest original meanings. The rhyme is listed in the Roud Folk Song Index as No. 13026.

As a figure in nursery culture, the character appears under a variety of near-rhyming names, such as Lille Trille (Danish), Wirgele-Wargele (German), Hümpelken-Pümpelken (German) and Hobberti Bob (Pennsylvania Dutch). As a character and literary allusion, Humpty Dumpty was referred to in several works of literature and popular culture in the nineteenth century. Lewis Carroll in particular made him an animated egg in his 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass, while in the United States the character was popularised by George L. Fox as a clown of that name in the Broadway pantomime musical Humpty Dumpty (1868).

Archer Taylor (August 1, 1890 – September 30, 1973) was one of America's "foremost specialists in American and European folklore", with a special interest in cultural history, literature, proverbs, riddles and bibliography.