Fat fat, ugly ugly,
all yellow in reality.
If you ask me what I am
I answer “cheep cheep cheep”.
Walking along I go ‘poopoo’,
who am I, tell me true?
Keep in mind this is a translation from Italian.
The film leaves it unanswered.
Something I thought was interesting was one of the other riddles which relies on using “second” as a pun between a unit of measurement and second as in a second helping. I guess that it works in Italian as well as English. I had a friend who saw it dubbed in Spanish and said it was the same joke.
Roberto Benigni says there’s no real answer to the riddle, just like Lewis Carroll’s famous raven-writing desk comparison.
However, some people believe that the answer is “a Jew.”
(This would make sense, since stereotypically, Jews are cheap, and they were forced to wear yellow Stars of David. However, I’ve never heard of them stereotyped as fat or ugly, and I have no idea why they would say “poopoo” as they walk-maybe a stereotyped interepretation of Yiddish?)
Well, if Benigni says there is no answer, I guess we’re kind of left with that.
The Jew answer would have worked well in the movie, since the riddle was being asked by a Nazi. Although the cheep/cheap homonym may not have worked in Italian or German.
I know Lewis Carroll said there was no real answer to “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”, but I think an acceptable answer would be “Because Poe wrote on both.”