30 Funny Riddles With Answers, Grouped by Type

How to Read These

Answers are in bold, immediately after each riddle. If you are reading these aloud, cover the line below with your hand or a piece of paper.

The five groups below are sorted by the trick, not by difficulty. A riddle that takes you literally fails in a different way from one built on a pun. That is the whole reason to group them.

Riddles That Take You Literally

These work because you fill in an assumption the riddle never made. The answer is always sitting in the exact words.

1. I get longer only when people stop moving, and I disappear the moment they do. What am I?
   A queue.
2. What do you buy specifically so it can sit unused, and feel cheated if you ever need it?
   Insurance.
3. I am opened and closed all day, and the people using me almost never look at me. What am I?
   A fridge door.
4. What gets shorter every time you use it correctly?
   A pencil. Also a candle, if you are feeling romantic about it.
5. I am the only thing you can lose completely and still be told to keep. What am I?
   Your temper.
6. What do you throw away to use, and pick up when you are done?
   An anchor.

Riddles Told by the Object

Classic first-person riddles, where an ordinary thing describes itself badly on purpose.

1. I am finished the moment somebody notices me, and useless afterwards. What am I?
   A surprise.
2. I am counted carefully by people who plan to ignore the total. What am I?
   The calories on a menu.
3. People buy me to eat, then never eat me. What am I?
   A plate.
4. The more of me there is, the less you can see. What am I?
   Darkness. Fog also accepts this answer and is smug about it.
5. I have keys but open nothing, and I have space but no room for you. What am I?
   A keyboard.
6. I am always in front of you but you will never reach me. What am I?
   The future.

Riddles With Silly Logic

The reasoning here is airtight and completely useless, which is exactly the appeal.

1. A man leaves home, turns left three times and comes back to find two people in masks waiting for him. Who are they?
   The catcher and the umpire. He was playing baseball.
2. If you have six apples and you take away four, how many do you have?
   Four. You took them.
3. Your phone rings at three in the morning and it is a wrong number. Which of you apologises?
   Both of you. It is three in the morning and neither of you is prepared to argue.
4. How many birthdays does the average person have?
   One. The rest are anniversaries of it.
5. Someone falls off a twenty-step ladder and is completely unhurt. How?
   They fell off the bottom step.
6. You are in a slow queue and switch to the fast one. What happens to the fast one?
   It becomes the slow one. This is the only law of queues that has never failed.

Riddles Built on Wordplay

These live entirely inside English. They are the ones that will not survive being translated, which is why the other language versions of this page have their own.

1. Why did the broken lift get an award?
   It had its ups and downs and still turned up every day.
2. Why is a battery the most honest thing in a drawer?
   It tells you exactly when it has nothing left to give.
3. Why should you never argue with a staircase?
   It will always take things one step at a time.
4. What do you call a fish wearing a very small crown?
   A king prawn, technically not a fish, and it knows.
5. Why did the maths book look so miserable?
   Too many problems, and nobody would solve a single one for free.
6. What kind of jam can never be spread on toast?
   A traffic jam.

Riddles for Younger Children

Shorter, kinder, and solvable by someone who has not yet learned that riddles are supposed to be unfair.

1. I have four legs but cannot walk anywhere at all. What am I?
   A table.
2. I am yellow, I am curved, and monkeys think about me constantly. What am I?
   A banana.
3. I am put on a table, cut into pieces, and nobody eats me. What am I?
   A pack of cards.
4. I am the thing you look for while holding it. What am I?
   Your phone.
5. What gets louder the quieter the room becomes?
   The fridge.
6. I stand up stiff in the packet, lie down in the pot, and go all floppy in hot water. What am I?
   Spaghetti.

How to Write Your Own

Once you see the pattern, making them is easier than finding them. Write one around an object, phrase or situation from your own setting.

Start from the answer. Pick an ordinary object. List everything true about it in the oddest possible phrasing. A keyboard has keys, has a space, has letters, and none of those words mean what they usually mean in that sentence. The riddle is already written.

Use the double meaning as the hinge. Every good riddle here turns on one word doing two jobs. Find that word first and build the sentence around it.

Make the wrong answer attractive. The best riddles lead you confidently to something that is almost right. If nobody guesses wrong, the reveal is not satisfying.

Cut every word you can. Read yours aloud and cut every word the joke survives without.

Test it on one person. If they groan, it works. If they say "oh, that is clever", it is a puzzle rather than a funny riddle, which is fine but a different thing.

FAQ

How many riddles are on this page?
Thirty, in five groups of six, written for this page rather than gathered from other lists.

What makes a riddle funny rather than just difficult?
The answer has to be obvious in hindsight. A difficult riddle makes you feel clever when you solve it; a funny one makes you feel slightly cheated, and that is the reaction you want to pass along.

What are good riddles for kids?
Short ones with a concrete, physical answer, like the six in the younger children section. Keep the younger-children section concrete; use the more abstract wordplay in the later sections.

How do I tell a riddle well?
Say it once, cleanly, then stop talking. The silence is doing the work. Repeat it if asked, but do not add hints in the first few seconds.

Why are the wordplay ones different in other languages?
Because puns do not translate. A riddle that hinges on one English word doing two jobs becomes nonsense word for word in another language, so the other versions of this page were written fresh rather than translated.

Can I use these?
Use them in conversation, in a classroom or in a party game. For republication, follow the site's content and usage terms.