Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

Agent Mulder: You saw it cross the road with your own eyes. How many more chickens have to cross the road before you believe it?

 

Alfred E. Neumann: What? Me worry?

 

Aristotle: To actualize its potential.

 

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.

 

Bill Clinton: I did not cross the road with THAT chicken. What do you mean by chicken? Could you define chicken, please?

 

Bill Gates: I have just released the new Chicken Office 2000, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook.

 

Bob Dylan: How many roads must one chicken cross?

 

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

 

Caesar: To come, to see, to conquer.

 

Captain Kirk: To boldly go where no chicken has gone before.

 

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.

 

Darwin: Chickens, over great periods of time, have been naturally selected in such a way that they are now genetically dispositioned to cross roads.

 

David Hume: Out of custom and habit.

 

Douglas Adams: Forty-two.

 

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, I’ve not been told!

Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road moved beneath the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

 

Emerson: The chicken didn’t cross the road; it transcended it.

 

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

 

Epicurus: For fun.

 

Freud: The fact that you are at all concerned that the chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity.

 

George W. Bush: We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road or not. The chicken is either with us or it is against us. There is no middle ground here.

 

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.

 

Gerald R. Ford: It probably fell from an airplane and couldn’t stop its forward momentum.

 

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!

 

Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

 

Grandpa: In my day, we didn’t ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us that the chicken had crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.

 

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.

 

H. P. Lovecraft: To escape the eldritch, cthonic, rugose, polypous, indescribably horrible abomination not from our space-time continuum.

 

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

 

Hemingway: To die. In the rain.  >> My Favorite!  

 

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

 

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.

 

Immanuel Kant: Because it was a duty.

 

J. Danforth Quayle: Ite sawe ae potatoee. 

 

Jack Nicholson: ‘Cause it (censored) wanted to. That’s the (censored) reason.

 

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!

 

Jacques Lacan: Because of its desire for object a.

 

James Joyce: Once upon a time, a nicens little chicken named baby tuckoo crossed the road and met a moocow coming down…

 

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

 

Jerry Seinfeld: Why does anyone cross a road? I mean, why doesn’t anyone ever think to ask, "What the heck was this chicken doing walking around all over the place, anyway? Where do they get these chickens?"

 

John Lennon: Imagine all the chickens crossing roads in peace.

 

John Paul Jones: It has not yet begun to cross!

 

Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

Mae West: I invited it to come up and see me sometime.

 

Margaret Thatcher: There was no alternative.

 

Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

 

Martin Luther King, Jr.: I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.

 

Michel Foucault: It did so because the dicourse of crossing the road left it no choice; the police state was oppressing it.

 

Molly Yard: It was a hen!

 

Mr. T: If you saw me coming you’d cross the road too!

 

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

 

Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.

 

Oliver Stone: The question is not, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" Rather, it is, "Who was crossing the road at the same time, whom we overlooked in our haste to observe the chicken crossing?"

 

Paul de Man: The chicken did not really cross the road because one side and the other are not really opposites in the first place.

 

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.

 

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

 

Pierre de Fermat: I just don’t have room here to give the full explanation.

 

Plato: For the greater good.

 

Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?

 

Ralph Nader: The chicken’s habitat on the original side of the road had been polluted by unchecked industrialist greed. The chicken did not reach the unspoiled habitat on the other side of the road because it was crushed by the wheels of a gas-guzzling SUV.

 

Rene Descartes: It had sufficient reason to believe it was dreaming anyway. 

 

Richard M. Nixon: The chicken did not cross the road. I repeat, the chicken did NOT cross the road.

 

Robert Frost: To cross the road less traveled by.

 

Roland Barthes: The chicken wanted to expose the myth of the road.

 

Ronald Reagan: I forget.

 

Roseanne Barr: Urrrrrp. What chicken?

 

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

 

Salvador Dali: The Fish.

 

Sisyphus: Was it pushing a rock, too?

 

Socrates: To pick up some hemlock at the corner druggist.

 

Timothy Leary: Because that’s the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.

 

The Sphinx: You tell me.

 

Thomas Dequincy: Because it ran out of opium.

 

Thoreau: To live deliberatelyand suck all the marrow out of life.

 

Torquemada: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I’ll find out.

 

Voltaire: I may not agree with what the chicken did, but I will defend to the death its right to do it.

 

Walt Whitman: To cluck the song of itself.

 

William Shakespeare: I don’t know why, but methinks I could rattle off a hundred-line soliloquy without much ado.

 

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.

 

Wolfgang von Beethoven: What? Speak up.

 

Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side.

 

 

And finally…

 

Colonel Sanders: I missed one?

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These answers also test how many cultural references you understand, if you understand why the person might say such a thing.  I leave the reader to do research to find out more.  

 

 = I have at least a high-level idea of either who the person is who said it, or the cultural reference involved.  And I can hear you now say to me: "NERD!  NERD!"  Hehehe.

 = It’s nice to know that one semester of Literature discussing and understanding the life and work of this author — him and him alone, literally — had some practical use in my life later on.  Of all the entries here, his entry is the one I understand completely.  Wow.  What joy. 

 

Special thanks go to Jaye for giving me the idea to write this.  For those who don’t like this post, feel free to blame her.  Hahaha!   (Just kidding! )

 

Want to know more about this chicken joke?  Check out Why did the chicken cross the road? in Wikipedia.