I heard this one years ago…never got the punch line! Here goes:
-a man walks in to a restaurant (which only serves alabatross)-he orders a baked albatross
-waiter brings him the bird
-Man pulls out pistol, shoots himself in the head
Anybody know the punchline? :smack:
It’s not a joke. It’s one of those ‘using only yes or no questions, figure out why the man shot himself’ deals. I won’t divulge the answer, though. You’ll have to figure it out for yourself. 
He forgot his “buy one baked albatross, get a free pelican pudding” coupon.
I just Googled the “answer.”
Here is my face: 
Yup.
Here is a site with dozens of this kind of “riddle,” answers provided. The one in question is #10. They are all rather entertaining reads, even though I’ve only gotten one right so far.
That was the answer? How the heck could someone have come up with that on their own?
As Gorsnak says, it’s not a joke and there’s no punchline. This is more of a riddle or mystery. There are all kinds of riddles along these lines, and you’ve probably heard several. Examples?
“There’s a man lying face down, dead, in the desert. Ge’s wearing a backpack What happened?”
The listener is allowed to think, and to ask a series of yes/no questions. At length, he may figure out that the bacpack was a paracute that didn’t open, which explains why the man is dead.
Back to the OP. The premise of the riddle is:
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An old sailor walks into a restaurant that advertises: “We sell roast albatross.”
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The sailor orders some albatross. He tastes it, and a look of horror comes over him.
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He immediately kills himself.
The listener is then left to figure out WHY the man killed himself. The answer lies in a long, complicated story, which I’ll summarize below:
Many years ago, when the old man was a young sailor, he and two crewmates were the sole survivors of a shipwreck, and they washed up on a desert island that seemed to have no food. They built a camp, and waited to be rescued. After a few days, they were starving. The three went in different directions, looking for food on the island. When the young sailor got back to camp, he found only one of his crewmates… but that crewmate had some meat! He said, “I found aflock of albatross on the other side of the island, and I killed a few. Now we have meat to keep us alive.” The two sailors ate that meat, and it kept them alive for several days. In the meantime, the third sailor was till missing, and never showed up.
Eventually, a rescue ship came by and saved the two castaways. But somehow, the young sailor felt uneasy. He had a terrible suspicion that maybe, just maybe, that wasn’t albatross meat he’d been eating. He had a terrible fear that maybe his friend had murdered their other friend, and that they’d survived by cannibalism!
All these years later, the old sailor saw a chance to taste real albatross meat. As soon as he did, he KNEW- the meat he’d eaten on that island was NOT albatross!
Sickened with the knowledge of what he’d done, the old sailor killed himself.
He wanted to try some albatross before he died right?
Ok, so I was wrong. Um, yeah, that’s a fun puzzle :dubious:
My brother did one of these to me once; something like, “After they got the arm, they threw it in the ocean.” I did eventually unravel the whole story, but boy it took a long time.
I bought the game Mindtrap years ago and haven’t played it as it was meant even once.
It’s fun to just take the cards out and try to figure out the riddles.
You don’t. Someone who knows the answer answers your yes or no questions so you can figure it out. Or not.
The albatross one is kind of fun. Kind of. It’s almost Lovecraftian, in a way. But I really question the idea of a restaurant that serves albatross.
The problem with a lot of these is that they assume that people will kill themselves, rather than as a last resort, as a first choice.
My fave from the linked page is this:
A man is dead in a room with a small pile of wood chips and sawdust in the corner.
My answer? The man was attacked by an angry beaver. Compare that to the “real” answer:
[spoiler]The man is a blind midget, the shortest one in the circus. Another midget, jealous because he’s not as short, has been sawing small pieces off the other’s cane every night. When the midget uses his cane each morning, it appears to him that he’s grown taller. Since his only income is from being a circus midget, he decides to kill himself when he gets too tall.
This is what’s known as the world’s stupidest answer. Is he genetically unable to measure himself against anything other than a cane? Wouldn’t he maybe wait to be fired from his job, rather than just assuming that his career was over? He decided to kill himself when he got too tall…so did sawing the can actually make him grow? I mean, come ON! I guess one of the yes-or-no questions should be “Is the answer something totally stupid that makes no sense?”[/spoiler]
Sengkelat:
[spoiler]Dude, he’s a circus midget. You don’t get stuck in that kind of a job if you’ve got the brainpower to realize that somebody’s screwing with your cane.
Besides, where did the wood chips come from if it was a beaver? Was the beaver so unclean that it brought in some “leftovers”? Was the circus midget made of wood?
…hey, that’s it! He was made of wood! He was Pinocchio!
alright, i’m stopping this. ;j [/spoiler]
and why doesn’t the jewish guy work?
Once, in highschool, towards the end of the year, my history teacher decided to give us a “day off” by telling some of these riddles and having the whole class try to guess them. One of the first ones was “There’s a cabin on the side of a mountain. There are two dead men in the cabin. How did they die?”
It’s an airplane cabin, and they died in a plane crash.
Now, I’m not a super-genius, but c;mon, how hard is that? Especially once you realize how many of these things rely on a double meaning. I guessed the right answer on the first try. And the teacher got pissed at me for cheating! She said it wasn’t fair if I already knew the answer, and wouldn’t call on me for the rest of the class!
I’m still bitter about that.
Oh, harmy you’re my soulmate. I love those riddles. We used to have a substitute teacher in Primary School who used to give us riddles like those and the class would have to ask questions to answer them. Great fun.
hijack
Can someone help me out with these riddles?
The sun goes down. A guy turns off the light and goes to sleep. He wakes up the next morning and turns on the light. He reads the headline of the news paper and shoots himself in the head. Why did he kill himself?
A man is lying dead in a field with a rock next to him. There has been no-one or nothing else in the field, how did he die?
A man sits in his living room reading the paper. On the front page he reads of a tragic accident in a ski resort. A woman has been killed leaving her husband devestated. The man immediatley knows it was no accident, that in fact the husband had murdered his wife. How?
thankyou
Cheddarsnax, I’ve known for a while that the jewish smilie turned Asian when highlighted, but I didn’t know he went gentile if you put him in a spoiler box. That’s probably because I don’t know how to do a spoiler box.
Note: I’m only guessing here, so these are probably not the “official” answers:
The guy works in a light-house, and when he turned off the light, he caused a shipwreck.
Meteorite?
The man is the husband.