Post Photo: Chicken | © Ulrike Leone on Pixabay
Actually an ancient joke, which was probably first published in the monthly magazine "The Knickerbocker" from New York. It reads as follows:
"Why did the chicken cross the road?
The Knickerbockers (1847)
To get to the other side."
Over the decades, more answers were found, keeping this joke alive in a wide variety of versions. Since I've been asked this question quite a few times, I eventually started collecting a few answers.
However, it all went through Nancy Gibson who asked me the following question and immediately gave the right answer:
"Why did the man cross the road?
Nancy Gibson, 2011
He heard the chicken was a slut."
Below you will find the answers that I personally liked best so far.
Kindergarten teacher
To get to the other side of the street.
My grandfather
In my day we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Somebody told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.
Jean-Paul Sartre
In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.
Plateau
For an important good.
Aristotle
It's the nature of chickens to cross streets.
Karl Marx
It was historically inevitable.
Douglas Adams
Forty two.
George W. Bush
This was an unprovoked act of international terrorism, and we reserve the right to take any action against the chicken that is appropriate to defend United States national security and the values of democracy and orthodoxy.
Mark Twain
The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.
Johannes rau
I think the chicken showed us in a very specific, calm way that, especially at a time that makes so many people think – I experience this again and again in my conversations – it is important not to see a street as something separating understand, but as something that can bring people's hearts together.
Ronald Reagan
I forgot.
Oliver North
National Security was at stake.
Dick Cheney
Where's my gun?
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!
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.
Captain James T Kirk
To go where no chicken has gone before.
Hippocrates
Because of an excess of sluggishness in the pancreas.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
I see a world where all chickens will be free to cross streets with their motives unquestioned.
Moses
And the Lord said to the chicken, "You shall cross the road." And the hen crossed the road, and there was great rejoicing.
David Hume
Out of custom and habit.
Helmut Kohl
I gave the chicken my word of honor not to publicly state his civic reasons for crossing the street.
Paul Anderson
Because it's too far to walk around.
Bill Clinton
I was never alone with this chicken.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The bottom line is that the chicken crossed the road. Who is interested in the reason? Crossing the road justifies whatever motive.
Gerhard Schroeder
I'll put it this way - the chicken probably found a steady hand with food across the street. Basta!
epicure
for fun
Pat Buchanan
To steal the job of a decent, hard-working American.
Siegmund Freud
The fact that you even bother with the question of the chicken crossing the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity.
Hamlet
That is not the question.
pyrrho
What road?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The eternal hen-principle made it do it.
Salvador Dali
the fish
Bill Gates
I just released the new Chicken 7.0, which not only can cross the road, but also can lay and hatch eggs.
Thomas de Torquemada
Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out.
Pastor Jürgen Fliege
The question is not "Why did the chicken cross the road?" but "Who was crossing the road at the same time that we overlooked in our haste while watching the chicken?"
Carl Jung
The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronously brought such occurrences into being.
Edmund Stoiber
The ... uhhh ... the chicken has, I think, and as the opinion of a majority or large number of German citizens, especially here in Bavaria, but also in the new old federal states, I am inclined to assume, the Federal Chancellor and here in particular the federal government, which has failed to address the direction in legislation and towards the United States, and is therefore not able to surprise uh convey.
Franz Kafka
Hardly the most urgent inquiry to make of a low-grade insurance clerk who woke up that morning as a hen.
Charles Darwin
Chickens have been naturally selected by nature for crossing roads for a long period of time.
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.
Albert Einstein
Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road moved under the chicken depends on your frame of reference.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It didn't cross the road; it transcends it.
Dieter Bohlen
Well, I just think it's absolutely awesome how the chicken did it. rat sharp.
Emily Dickinson
Because it couldn't stop for death.
Henry David Thoreau
To live deliberately... and suck all the marrow out of life.
Gautama Buddha
With this question you deny your own chicken nature.
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.
Ernest Hemingway
To die; in the rain.
Timothy Leary
Because that's the only kind of trip the establishment would let it take.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Because if you gaze too long across the road, the road also gazes across you.
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.
Werner Heisenberg
We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.
Roland Berger
Increasing deregulation on the chicken's side of the road threatened its dominant market position as well as its previous areas of expertise. The chicken faced significant challenges in developing the skills needed to compete in the new competitive markets. Working in partnership with the client, Roland Berger helped the chicken to rethink its physical distribution strategy and implementation processes appropriate to the market. Using the Poultry Allocation Model (GAM), Berger provided the necessary support for the chicken to use its skills, methodologies, knowledge, capital and experience to leverage the chicken's people, processes and technology for the collaborative implementation of its overall strategy within the program - Align management framework. Roland Berger drew on a diverse cross-spectrum of road analysts and best hens, as well as Berger consultants with broad experience in ornithological logistics, who, in meetings lasting several days, brought their personal knowledge asset, both tacit and apparent, to a common level and synergies to achieve the imperative goal of developing and implementing a company-wide value framework within the middle poultry process. The workshop took place in a park-like environment to create an effective test atmosphere. This enabled a strategy commitment that opened the way to a consistent, clear and unique market statement. Roland Berger helped the chicken to change. In other words: Berger brings change, change is success, success is the future.
Why did the chicken commit suicide?
Anon
To get to the other side.
