WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD? Collected by Alan Silverstein Last updated: October 31, 2012 See also: http://www.whydidthechickencrosstheroad.com/ (sheesh) The Bible: And God came down from the heavens, and He said unto the chicken, "Thou shalt cross the road." And the Chicken did then cross the road, and there was much rejoicing. Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side. Plato: For the greater good. Aristotle: To actualize its potential. Hippocrates: Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas. Epicurus: For fun. Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road? Sisyphus: Was it pushing a rock, too? Socrates: To pick up some hemlock at the corner druggist. Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature. Lao Tse: Those who know do not cluck; those who cluck do not know. Thomas de Torquemada (or, L.A. Police Department): Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out. Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the princely chicken's dominion maintained. Also: The point is that the chicken crossed the road. Who cares why? The ends of crossing the road justify whatever motive there was. Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you. Jacques Derrida: Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD! Sappho: Due to the loveliness of the hen on the other side, more fair than all of Hellas' fine armies. Also: For the touch of your skin, the sweetness of your lips... Thomas Paine: Out of common sense. Gregor Mendel: To get various strains of roads. Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees. Also: Chickens, over great periods of time, have been naturally selected in such a way that they are now genetically dispositioned to cross roads. Stephen Jay Gould: It is possible that there is a sociobiological explanation for it, but we have been deluged in recent years with sociobiological stories despite the fact that we have little direct evidence about the genetics of behavior, and we do not know how to obtain it for the specific behaviors that figure most prominently in sociobiological speculation. John Paul Jones: It has not yet begun to cross! Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability. Also: To escape the bourgeois middle-class struggle. Joseph Stalin: I don't care. Catch it. Crack its eggs to make my omlette. Adolf Hitler: It needed Lebensraum. George Orwell: Because the government had fooled him into thinking that he was crossing the road of his own free will, when he was really only serving their interests. Shakespeare: But lo, what light through yonder roadcut breaks? Tis the east, and fair chicken is the sun. Cross, fair sun, and chase away the moon, who is already sick and pale with grief that thou her master art far more fair than she... Hamlet: Because 'tis better to suffer in the mind the slings and arrows of outrageous road maintenance than to take arms against a sea of oncoming vehicles. Emily Dickenson: Because it could not stop for death. Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately... And suck all the marrow out of life. Johann Friedrich von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it. John Milton: To justify the ways of God to men. Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it. Robert Frost: To cross the road less traveled by. Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain. Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated. t s eliot: It's not that they cross, but that they cross like chickens. H.P. Lovecraft: To futilely attempt escape from the dark powers which even then pursued it, hungering after the stuff of its soul! Aleister Crowley: Because it was its True Will to do so. Dorothy Parker: Travel, trouble, music, art / A kiss, a frock, a rhyme / The chicken never said they fed its heart / But still they pass its time. Trent Reznor: Because the world is F***ED UP and it HATES ITSELF for being such a PITIFUL WHINY USELESS SH*T! John Constantine: Because it'd made a bollocks of things over on this side of the road and figured it'd better get out right quick. Candide: To cultivate its garden. Mae West: I invited it to come up and see me sometime. Walt Whitman: To cluck the song of itself. William Wordsworth: To have something to recollect in tranquility. J.R.R. Tolkein: The chicken, sunlight coruscating off its radiant yellow-white coat of feathers, approached the dark, sullen asphalt road and scrutinized it intently with its obsidian-black eyes. Every detail of the thoroughfare leapt into blinding focus: The rough texture of the surface, over which countless tires had worked their relentless tread through the ages; the innumerable fragments of stone embedded within the lugubrious mass, perhaps quarried from the great pits where the Sons of Man labored not far from here; the dull black asphalt itself, exuding those waves of heat which distort the sight and bring weakness to the body; the other attributes of the great highway too numerous to give name. And then it crossed it. Gandalf: O chicken, do not meddle in the affairs of roads, for you are tasty and good with barbecue sauce. Dylan Thomas: To not go (sic) gentle into that good night. Also: How many roads must one chicken cross? Henny Youngman: Take this chicken... please. Joseph Conrad: Mistah Chicken, he dead. Robert Heinlein: In a free society "crossing the road" is a privilege asserted by all armed citizen chickens. Also: To grok the fullness of the road. Robert Wilson: Because agents of the Ancient Illuminated Roosters of Cooperia were controlling it with their Orbital Mind-Control Lasers as part of their master plan to take over the world's egg production. Sigmund Freud: The chicken obviously was female and obviously interpreted the pole on which the crosswalk sign was mounted as a phallic symbol of which she was envious, selbstverstaendlich. Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being. B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will. Rene Descartes: It had sufficient reason to believe it was dreaming anyway. Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road. Gottfried Von Leibniz: In this best possible world, the road was made for it to cross. Doug Hofstadter: To seek explication of the correspondence between appearance and essence through the mapping of the external road-object onto the internal road-concept. Michael Palin: Nobody expects the banished inky chicken! Baldrick: It had a cunning plan. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The possibility of "crossing" was encoded into the objects "chicken" and "road", and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence. Georg Friedrich Riemann: The answer appears in Dirichlet's lectures. Sir Isaac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to cross the road. Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference. Wolfgang Pauli: There already was a chicken on the other side of the road. Paul Erdos: It was forced to do so by the chicken-hole principle. M.C. Escher: That depends on which plane of reality the chicken was on at the time. Groucho Marx: Chicken? What's all this talk about chicken? Why, I had an uncle who thought he was a chicken. My aunt almost divorced him, but we needed the eggs. Stan Laurel: I'm sorry, Ollie. It escaped when I opened the run. Timothy Leary: Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take. Malcolm X: Because it would get across that road by any means necessary. Louis Farrakhan: The road, you will see, represents the black man. The chicken crossed the "black man" in order to trample him and keep him down. Martin Luther King Jr: It had a dream. Also: I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question. Howard Cosell: It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events to grace the annals of history. An historic, unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt such an Herculean achievement formerly relegated to Homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurrence. Salvador Dali: The Fish. Douglas Adams: Forty-two. Molly Yard: It was a hen! Pat Buchanan: To steal a job from a decent, hard-working American. Oliver North: National Security was at stake. Richard M. Nixon: The chicken did not cross the road. I repeat, the chicken did not cross the road. Johnny Cochran: The chicken didn't cross the road. It was planted there by the police! Rodney King: Why can't the chicken just cross the road? Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast. David Hume: Out of custom and habit. Jack Nicholson: 'Cause it @#$%& wanted to. That's the @#$%& reason. Gerald Ford: It probably fell from an airplane and couldn't stop its forward momentum. Ronald Reagan: I forget. John Sununu: The Air Force was only too happy to provide the transportation, so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of the opportunity. Margaret Thatcher: There was no alternative. Saddam Hussein: This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it. Lee Iacocca: It found a better car, which was on the other side of the road. Colonel Sanders: I missed one? Mulder: It was a government conspiracy. Scully: It was a simple bio-mechanical reflex that is commonly found in chickens. James Kirk: To boldly go where no chicken has gone before. Mr. Spock: It was the logical thing to do. Mr. Scott: 'Cos ma wee transporter beam was na functioning properly. Ah canna work miracles, Captain! Jean-Luc Picard: To see what's out there. Also: To make it so. Darth Vader: Because it could not resist the power of the Dark Side. Leda: Are you sure it wasn't Zeus dressed up as a chicken? He's into that kind of thing, you know. Basil Fawlty: Oh, don't mind that chicken. It's from Barcelona. Roseanne Barr: Urrrrrp. What chicken? The Sphinx: You tell me. Gary Gygax: Because I rolled a 64 on the "Chicken Random Behaviors" chart on page 497 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. Bill Gates: I have just released the new Chicken 2000, which will both cross roads AND balance your checkbook, though when it divides 3 by 2 it gets 1.4999999999. Andersen Consultant: Deregulation of the chicken's side of the road was threatening its dominant market position. The chicken was faced with significant challenges to create and develop the competencies required for the newly competitive market. Andersen Consulting, in a partnering relationship with the client, helped the chicken by rethinking its physical distribution strategy and implementation processes. Using the Poultry Integration Model (PIM) Andersen helped the chicken use its skills, methodologies, knowledge capital and experiences to align the chicken's people, processes and technology in support of its overall strategy within a Program Management framework. Andersen Consulting convened a diverse cross-spectrum of road analysts and best chickens along with Andersen consultants with deep skills in the transportation industry to engage in a two-day itinerary of meetings in order to leverage their personal knowledge capital, both tacit and explicit, and to enable them to synergize with each other in order to achieve the implicit goals of delivering and successfully architecting and implementing an enterprise-wide value framework across the continuum of poultry cross-median processes. The meeting was held in a park like setting enabling and creating an impactful environment which was strategically based, industry-focused, and built upon a consistent, clear, and unified market message and aligned with the chicken's mission, vision, and core values. This was conducive towards the creation of a total business integration solution. Andersen Consulting helped the chicken change to become more successful. Dr. Seuss: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes! The chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed it, I've not been told! Pope: He was giving it last rites. Pundit: Because it was stapled to the punk rocker. Paranoiac: It was too chicken to stay on the other side. Skeptic: To prove to the armadillo it could actually be done! Frank and Ernest: To escape from the easter bunny. AND THE ALL-TIME BEST ANSWER: Because the rooster was on the other side! ---------------- From: smm12@cl.cam.ac.uk Date: 27 Jun 89 Subject: Topological joke... Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny Q: Why did the chicken cross the Moebius Strip? A: To get to the other... um... er... ---------------- Software answers: Assembler chicken: First it builds the road... C chicken: It crosses the road without looking both ways. C++ chicken: The chicken wouldn't have to cross the road, you'd simply refer to him on the other side. COBOL chicken: 0001-CHICKEN-CROSSING. IF NO-MORE-VEHICLES THEN PERFORM 0010-CROSS-THE-ROAD VARYING STEPS FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL ON-THE-OTHER-SIDE ELSE GO TO 0001-CHICKEN-CROSSINGc Cray chicken: Crosses faster than any other chicken, but if you don't dip it in liquid nitrogen first, it arrives on the other side fully cooked. Delphi chicken: The chicken is dragged across the road and dropped on the other side. G3 300 MHz chicken: It crosses twice as fast as any Pentium chicken. Gopher chicken: Tried to run, but got flattened by the Web chicken. Intel Pentium chicken: The chicken crossed 4.9999978 times. Iomega chicken: The chicken should have backed up before crossing. Java chicken: If your road needs to be crossed by a chicken, the server will download one to the other side. (Of course, those are chicklets.) Lotus chicken: Don't you DARE try to cross the road the same way we do! Mac chicken: No reasonable chicken owner would want a chicken to cross the road, so there's no way to tell it to do so. Microsoft chicken (TM): It's already on both sides of the road. And it just bought the road. Newton chicken: Can't cluck, can't fly, and can't lay eggs, but you can carry it across the road in your pocket! NT chicken: Will cross the road in June. No, August. September for sure. OOP chicken: It doesn't need to cross the road, it just sends a message. OS/2 chicken: It crossed the road in style years ago, but it was so quiet that nobody noticed. OS/ 8.1 HFS+ chicken: It had much more free space to cross. Quantum Logic chicken: The chicken is distributed probabilistically on all sides of the road until you observe it on the side of your choice. Visual Basic chicken: USHighways! (aChicken) Web chicken: Jumps out onto the road, turns right, and just keeps on running. Windows 95 chicken: You see different colored feathers while it crosses, but cook it and it still tastes like... chicken. Windows 98 chicken: It should have expected to cause a crash while crossing. ---------------- From: Dave Disser Date: 12 May 1998 16:20:37 -0700 Newsgroups: hp.misc > Hmph. No Unix chicken... The Unix users are too busy building roads to mess around with the chickens. ---------------- Added in 2012: Barack Obama: We must provide for ALL of our citizens' critical needs, even chickens! Mitt Romney: The chicken heard there was free welfare corn on the other side. That's what happens when the government builds roads, instead of private enterprise.... Let a corporation transport those chickens!