Tis a Puzzlement!

64 Arts

Yul Brenner as the King of Siam… awesome movie. I’ve got the Rex Harrison version playing behind me via Netflix, but it’s just not the same.

At any rate, it’s time for our next art!

28 Conundrums

Presented as a game or as a subject for discussion.

Oh, let’s go with a game, shall we?!

I don’t know about you, but so far this year has been full of ups and downs and I could use a little light-hearted fun, perhaps even in the shape of a pun.

Because that’s all a conundrum boils down to:

A conundrum is a riddle in the form of a question, the answer to which involves a pun. Originally the term was applied to any quaint expression. It is thus, in its modern form, a union of the elaborate riddle and the impromptu pun.

from The Handbook of Conundrums by Edith B Ordway

Here are a couple of examples that tickled my funny bone:

What herb is there that cures all diseases? Thyme.

What evidence have we that Adam used sugar? Because he raised Cain.

Those are pretty simple because it’s not much of a stretch between thyme and time, Cain and cane (as in sugar cane).

Others might be more of a stretch, requiring you to even say the answer out loud before it “clicks.” For instance,

The name of what character in history would a person mention in asking the servant to put coal on the fire? Phillip the Great.

Takes a moment to kick in but when you say Phillip the Great it can sound like “fill up the grate,” which is, of course, the point!

So I have a challenge for you:

I’ve pulled together 10 conundrums, below, all with the punny answer missing. It’s a handy-dandy web form (make sure to click over to the post if you can’t see it via RSS) and I encourage you to fill them out with your best guesses. I’ll leave the form up for a week before posting the answers and announcing a winner.

The winner will be the one with the most correct answers or, if there is a tie, I’ll draw one of the names out of a hat.

Ready? Set? Puzzle!

What will the winner get? I’m still deciding, but probably one of my hand-bound journals.

I do hope you’ll play along!