Riddles

[FayetheAspie]

Exactly. Including the thing in common that you already listed. It seems kind of odd that he's supposed to be so super smart so better than everyone else in Gotham and yet missed those angles himself.

 

[Boogs]

I think the trick is to choose things which have a set of attributes well known in general, where one of those attributes matches in a relevant way across all of them. Then to solve one needs to look for all those attributes for all the items to find the matches. Where it gets interesting is that those attributes differ depending on the context of how you view that item. The problem is finding something that most people would know about, or be able to work out, without making it too obvious a connection.

Ed's enigma, without additional context to the riddle, or an expansion of the answer, requires coming up with arbitrary relationships to find a match, where the answer has nothing more to do with those things than anything else (e.g. they are all made of matter, but so is every other solid thing). Therefore there is no riddle, making it a joke, but it's neither clever, interesting or funny, so what's the point of it?

It feels like it's trying too hard to be clever, and instead is just trite.