The two riddles that Robin answers are NOT Bat Deductions:
Batman: What has yellow skin and writes?
Robin: A ballpoint banana!
Batman: What sits in a tree, weighs six ounces, and is very dangerous?
Robin: A sparrow with a machine gun!
These were actually well-known riddles back in the 1960s. Absurd riddles were a huge fad, designed to subvert your expectations with completely ludicrous answers. Banana/fruit jokes, bird jokes, and elephant jokes were popular subsets of these. Bat Deduction states that such a deduction must use a huge mental leap to reach its conclusion, but these riddles weren't any kind of leap to US baby-boomers in the 1960s. Robin would've heard a ton of these riddles, especially if he was in school at the time.
The machine-gun one had several versions with different birds:
Q. What's black, sits in a tree, and is very dangerous?
A. A crow with a machine gun! (Brown and red = robin; blue = bluejay; red = cardinal; red, blue, yellow, and green = a sparrow in a tie-dyed t-shirt)
The ball-point banana had a few different versions:
Q. What's pointy, yellow, and goes click-click?
A. A ballpoint banana!
Q. What's yellow, but leaves blue stains everywhere?
A. A ballpoint banana!
The most well-known absurd jokes are the Elephant Jokes:
Q. What's red and white on the outside and grey, red, and white on the inside?
A. Campbell's Cream of Elephant Soup.
Q. Why did the elephant paint its toenails red?
A. So it could hide in a cherry tree.
Q. Why is it dangerous to walk thru the jungle at four o'clock?
A. Because that's when elephants jump out of the trees.
Q. Why are pygmies so short?
A. Because they walk thru the jungle at four o'clock!
(Evidently TV Tropes hates editing on ipads, because I can't get external links to my sources to work here. Search Wikipedia on Elephant Jokes if you need sources for what I'm saying.)
Bat Deduction:
The two riddles that Robin answers are NOT Bat Deductions:
These were actually well-known riddles back in the 1960s. Absurd riddles were a huge fad, designed to subvert your expectations with completely ludicrous answers. Banana/fruit jokes, bird jokes, and elephant jokes were popular subsets of these. Bat Deduction states that such a deduction must use a huge mental leap to reach its conclusion, but these riddles weren't any kind of leap to US baby-boomers in the 1960s. Robin would've heard a ton of these riddles, especially if he was in school at the time.
The machine-gun one had several versions with different birds:
The ball-point banana had a few different versions:
The most well-known absurd jokes are the Elephant Jokes:
(Evidently TV Tropes hates editing on ipads, because I can't get external links to my sources to work here. Search Wikipedia on Elephant Jokes if you need sources for what I'm saying.)
This might be a case of Society Marches On or Time Marches On, or even Aluminum Christmas Trees, but not Bat Deduction.
Edited by FranksGirl