Yo, I'm interesting in trying my Japanese ability by solving riddles, understanding puns and wordplay. Do you know resources for doing that? Maybe a collection of clever jokes in Japanese would help.

奥：餃子作るからしょうがとニンニクを出してチョ
夫：しょうがないな、、
奥：お前だせえよ、、離婚しようかな、、

har har. オヤジギャグ

なぞ or なぞなぞ is the word for riddle (that I know). Just googling that, I found:

なぞなぞ.com
http://ameblo.jp/nazonazo/

They are apparently aimed for kids, as they are pretty easy to understand. For example:
（今日のなぞなぞ）赤ちゃんを、お風呂に入れたらどうなった？
（解答）あかが取れてちゃんとした
ho ho ho

Uhm, I have expressed me wrong. I'm looking for longer stories, but not as big as rakugo's. But a collection of short rakugo stories would also be nice.

「ミニスカート」とかけて、「結婚式のスピーチ」と解く。その心は


「どちらも短いほど喜ばれる」


Something like this or longer?

Is rakugo something today's youth would even understand and find funny?

You're probably better off studying some manzai stuff.

Nice flamebait.

But back on the subject.
Thanks masaman, your post led me to wikipedia that eventually led me to this page http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:落語の演目

The kind of rakugo story I'm searching for are short stories like 饅頭怖い

mentat_kgs Wrote:Nice flamebait.

huh?

Hey hey hey,

Yea, 落語 is kind of old and I don't usually watch it, but for the sake of this thread, I checked this one out.

The wordings seems to be, to my surprise, pretty modern, and the jokes are
logical so it can be explained. One of my American friends used to like 笑点 a lot,
I thought that's old but now I understand why.

But then, I'm not exactly today's youth

I took a Japanese test this last friday.
The test had 20 questions, 1 text for each question. Each test was an editorial or an article from the news or magazine (2 were from yomiuri). And had to be finished in 1h.
It got me worried because I did not so well as I think I would. At the ~7th text my head had already started to spin and from that it was downhill.

I'm already used to reading and listening Japanese to some degree. I even was growing overconfident. But these texts showed me I still have a lot to learn to get past the never-ending intermediate level.

That's why I want toughter material. To be prepared for toughter situations. So the next time I take this test, I'll ace it.
These rakugo stories really are what I was looking for. Something hard to understand but still interesting content. Great study material.

I love this one:

It's also pretty modern and quite simple compared to "normal" rakugo. And since it's Nagase Tomoya, it makes sense for those of us who has seen Tiger & Dragon.