A black and white newspaper that is "read" all over.
The newspaper riddle is a riddle joke or conundrum in English that begins with the question:[1]
Q: What is black and white and red all over?
The traditional answer, which relies upon the identical pronunciation of the words "red" and "read", is:[1][2]
A: A newspaper.
Barrick[1] believes this riddle to be "perhaps the most common example of a folk riddle collected in the United States in the twentieth century", pointing out that between 1917 and 1939 it appeared in 15 collections of folk riddles, and in a further six between 1939 and 1974.
Alternative answers to the riddle exist, where red is used as a color, parodying the canonical form of the riddle. Examples include: "a chocolate sundae with ketchup on top", "a badger in a blender", "a crossword done in red ink",[3] and "a penguin with a sunburn". Portnoy describes these answers as "adequate, but not clever", because they lack the homophonic pun.[4]
A much darker version of the riddle exists with the answer "A Wounded Nun." This is also the answer to the similar riddle "What's black and white and crawls on all fours?"[5]
^ abcMac E. Barrick (July–September 1974). "The Newspaper Riddle Joke". The Journal of American Folklore. 87 (345): 253–257. doi:10.2307/538740. JSTOR 538740.
^George Yule (1996). The Study of Language. Cambridge University Press. p. 122. ISBN 0-521-56851-X.
^New York Folklore Society (1945). New York Folklore Quarterly. Cornell University Press. p. 247.
^Phyllis Portnoy (2006). The Remnant: Essays on a Theme in Old English Verse. Runetree. p. 32. ISBN 1-898-57710-2.
^Elliott Oring (1 October 2010). Engaging Humor. University of Illinois Press. pp. 24–. ISBN 978-0-252-09205-3.
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