Contents

1. Why the chicken cross the road?

1. Why the chicken cross the road? ¶

1.1. Douglas Adams ¶

Forty-two.

1.2. Aristotle ¶

To actualize its potential.

1.3. Roseanne Barr ¶

Urrrrrp. What chicken?

1.4. Roland Barthes ¶

The chicken wanted to expose the myth of the road.

1.5. Brak, of Space Ghost ¶

Well, it wasn't a road, it was a path at the chicken farm, and he was just wandering around.

1.6. Buddha ¶

If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.

1.7. George Bush ¶

To face a kinder, gentler thousand points of headlights.

1.8. Julius Caesar ¶

To come, to see, to conquer.

1.9. Candide ¶

To cultivate its garden.

1.10. Bill the Cat ¶

Oop Ack.

1.11. Noam Chomsky ¶

The chicken didn't exactly cross the road. As of 1994, something like 99.8% of all US chickens reaching maturity that year had spent 82% of their lives in confinement. The living conditions in most chicken coops break every international law ever written, and some, particularly the ones for chickens bound for slaughter, border on inhumane. My point is, they had no chance to cross the road (unless you count the ride to the supermarket). Even if one or two have crossed roads for whatever reason, most never get a chance. Of course, this is not what we are told. Instead, we see chickens happily dancing around on Sesame Street and Foster Farms commercials where chickens are not only crossing roads, but driving trucks (incidentally, Foster Farms is owned by the same people who own the Foster Freeze chain, a subsidiary of the dairy industry). Anyway, ... (Chomsky continues for 32 pages. For the full text of his answer, contact Odonian Press)

1.12. Andrew Dice Clay ¶

To (censored), What can I tell you -OOOOOOOOOOH

1.13. Joseph Conrad ¶

Mistah Chicken, he dead.

1.14. 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 occurence.

1.15. Salvador Dali ¶

The Fish.

1.16. Darwin ¶

It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.

1.17. Thomas Dequincy ¶

Because it ran out of opium.

1.18. 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.

1.19. Jacques Derrida (in a contending discourse) ¶

What is the *difference?* The chicken was merely deferring from one side of the road to other. And how do we get the idea of the chicken in the first place? Does it exist outside of language?

1.20. Rene Descartes ¶

It had sufficient reason to believe it was dreaming anyway.

1.21. Emily Dickinson ¶

Because it could not stop for death.

1.22. Bob Dylan ¶

How many roads must one chicken cross?

1.23. Albert Einstein ¶

Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

1.24. TS Eliot ¶

Weialala leia / Wallala leialala.

1.25. TS Eliot (revisited) ¶

Do I dare to cross the road?

1.26. Ralph Waldo Emerson ¶

It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.

1.27. Epicurus ¶

For fun.

1.28. Paul Erdos ¶

It was forced to do so by the chicken-hole principle.

1.29. Basil Fawlty ¶

Oh, don't mind that chicken. It's from Barcelona.

1.30. Gerald R. Ford ¶

It probably fell from an airplane and couldn't stop its forward momentum.

1.31. Michel Foucault ¶

It did so because the discourse of crossing the road left it no choice-the police state was oppressing it.

1.32. 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.

1.33. Robert Frost ¶

To cross the road less traveled by.

1.34. Zsa Zsa Gabor ¶

It probably crossed to get a better look at my legs, which, thank goodness, are good, dahling.

1.35. Gilligan ¶

The traffic started getting rough; ===
the chicken had to cross. ===
If not for the plumage of its peerless tail ===
the chicken would be lost, ===
the chicken would be lost!

1.36. Johann Friedrich von Goethe ¶

The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

1.37. 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.

1.38. Ernest Hemingway ¶

To die. In the rain.

1.39. Werner Heisenberg ¶

We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.

1.40. Hippocrates ¶

Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.

1.41. Adolf Hitler ¶

It needed Lebensraum.

1.42. David Hume ¶

Out of custom and habit.

1.43. Saddam Hussein ¶

This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.

1.44. Lee Iacocca ¶

It found a better car, which was on the other side of the road.

1.45. Lyndon Johnson ¶

To show the armadillo that, "it can be done."

1.46. John Paul Jones ¶

It has not yet begun to cross!

1.47. James Joyce ¶

Once upon a time a nicens little chicken named baby tuckoo crossed the road and met a moocow coming down...

1.48. James Joyce ¶

To forge in the smithy of its soul the uncreated conscience of its race.

1.49. Leopold Bloom ¶

Wonder why chickens cross roads. Must be some law. Migration maybe. Mrs Marion Bloom.

1.50. Molly Bloom ¶

the chicken crossed the road well Poldy I dont know why why do you worry about such stupid bloody things O speaking of stupid bloody things here it comes again damn it its only been three weeks I wonder is there something wrong with me yes

1.51. 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.

1.52. Immanuel Kant ¶

Because it was a duty.

1.53. Martin Luther King ¶

It had a dream.

1.54. James Tiberius Kirk ¶

To boldly go where no chicken has gone before.

1.55. Jacques Lacan ¶

Because of its desire for *object a*.

1.56. Stan Laurel ¶

I'm sorry, Ollie. It escaped when I opened the run.

1.57. Timothy Leary ¶

Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.

1.58. Leda ¶

Are you sure it wasn't Zeus dressed up as a chicken? He's into that kind of thing, you know.

1.59. Gottfried Von Leibniz ¶

In this best of all possible worlds, the road was made for it to cross.

1.60. 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.

1.61. Paul de Man ¶

The chicken did not really cross the road because one sideand the other are not really opposites in the first place.

1.62. Paul de Man (uncovered after his death) ¶

So no one would find out it wrote for a collaborationist Belgian newspaper during the early years of World War II.

1.63. Groucho Marx ¶

Chicken? What's all this talk about a chicken? Why, I had an uncle who thought he was a chicken. My aunt almost divorced him, but we needed the eggs.

1.64. Karl Marx ¶

To escape the bourgeois middle-class struggle.

1.65. Also Karl Marx ¶

It was a historical inevitability.

1.66. Katherine McKinnon ¶

Because, in this patriarchial state, for the last four centuries, men have applied their principles of justice in determining how chickens should be cared for, their language has demeaned the identity of the chicken, their technology and trucks have decided how and where chickens will be distributed, their science has become the basis for what chickens eat, their sense of humor has provided the framework for this joke, their art and film have given us our perception of chicken life, their lust for flesh has has made the chicken the most consumed animal in the US, and their legal system has left the chicken with no other recourse.

1.67. Gregor Mendel ¶

To get various strains of roads.

1.68. John Milton ¶

To justify the ways of God to men.

1.69. Eddie Murphy ¶

To get to the (censored) other side.

1.70. Alfred E. Neumann ¶

What? Me worry?

1.71. Sir Isaac Newton ¶

Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to cross the road.

1.72. Moses ¶

Know ye that it is unclean to eat the chicken that has crossed the road, and therefore the chicken that crosseth the road doth so for its own preservation.

1.73. Jack Nicholson ¶

'Cause it (censored) wanted to. That's the (censored) reason.

1.74. Nietzsche ¶

Because if you gaze too long across the road, the road gazes also across you.

1.75. Oliver North ¶

National Security was at stake.

1.76. Camille Paglia ¶

It was drawn by the subconscious chthonian power of the feminine which men can never understand, to cross the road and focus itself on its task. Hens are not capable of doing this- their minds do not work that way. Feminism tries vainly to pretend there is no real difference between them, falsely following Rousseau. But de Sade has proved....

1.77. Thomas Paine ¶

Out of common sense.

1.78. Michael Palin ¶

Nobody expects the banished inky chicken!

1.79. Wolfgang Pauli ¶

There already was a chicken on the other side of the road.

1.80. Plato ¶

For the greater good.

1.81. Pyrrho the Skeptic ¶

What road?

1.82. Ayn Rand ¶

It was crossing the road *because of its own rational choice to do so*. There cannot be a collective unconscious; desires are unique to each individual.

1.83. Ronald Reagan ¶

I forget.

1.84. Jean-Paul Sartre ¶

In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

1.85. 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.

1.86. John Sununu ¶

The Air Force was only too happy to provide the transportation, so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of the opportunity.

1.87. The Sphinx ¶

You tell me.

1.88. Joseph Stalin ¶

I don't care. Catch it. I need its eggs to make my omelette.

1.89. Georg Friedrich Riemann ¶

The answer appears in Dirichlet's lectures.

1.90. Mr. Scott ¶

'Cos ma wee transporter beam was na functioning properly. Ah canna work miracles, Captain!

1.91. William Shakespeare ¶

I don't know why, but methinks I could rattle off a hundred-line soliloquy about it without much ado.

1.92. Sisyphus ¶

Was it pushing a rock, too?

1.93. Socrates ¶

To pick up some hemlock at the corner druggist.

1.94. Mr. T ¶

If you saw me coming you'd cross the road too!

1.95. Brad Templeton (Moderator of Rec.humor.funny) ¶

Do you think I have time to answer questions like that? I'm not a riddle-answering service. Anyway, I've heard it before.

1.96. Margaret Thatcher ¶

There was no alternative.

1.97. Dylan Thomas ¶

To not go (sic) gentle into that good night.

1.98. Henry David Thoreau ¶

To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of life.

1.99. Thomas de Torquemada ¶

Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out.

1.100. Mark Twain ¶

The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

1.101. George Washington ¶

Actually it crossed the Delaware with me back in 1776. But most history books don't reveal that I bunked with a birdie during the duration.

1.102. Mae West ¶

I invited it to come up and see me sometime.

1.103. Walt Whitman ¶

To cluck the song of itself.

1.104. 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.

1.105. William Wordsworth ¶

To have something to recollect in tranquility.

1.106. Malcom X ¶

It was coming home to roost.

1.107. Molly Yard ¶

It was a hen!

1.108. Henny Youngman ¶

Take this chicken ... please.

1.109. Zeno of Elea ¶

To prove it could never reach the other side. ===
Why did the pervert cross the road? ===
Because he was stuck in the chicken.

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last modified 2012-05-08 14:46:57