Why did the chicken cross the road?
Question: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Sigmund Freud: As an expression of the repressed desire to have sex with its
mother. The road
symbolizes the barrier presented by the cultural taboo.
Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed
the chicken depends upon your
frame of reference.
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.
Plato: For the greater good.
Aristotle: To fulfill its nature on the other side.
Karl Marx: It was an historical inevitability.
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 who 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.
Hippocrates: Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.
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, DEAD, DEAD!
Thomas de Torquemada: Because of Satan's influence. Crossing the road is
heresy. The chicken must
confess to its sins in order to be saved. I'll call another Inquisition.
Timothy Leary: Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment would
let it take.
Douglas Adams: Forty-two.
Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also
across you.
Oliver North: National Security was at stake.
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.
Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt recessitated
that individual chickens cross
roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought
such occurrences into being.
Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the
chicken found it necessary to cross
the road.
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.
Salvador Dali: The Fish.
Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.
Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.
Epicurus: For fun.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.
Johann Friedrich von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.
Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.
E.O. Wilson: Under the influence of a road-crossing gene, selected because
it conferred a survival
advantage in the chicken's ancestral line. We could conjecture, for example,
that crossing roads
represents the transfer of a behavioral trait whereby some chickens sought to
distance themselves from
rivals, thereby distinguishing them in the eyes of potential mates and
increasing their reproductive
potential.
Sir Edmund Hillary: Because it was there.
Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was
on, but it was moving very
fast.
Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.
David Hume: Out of custom and habit.
Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?
Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of
life.
Mishima: For the beauty of it. The chicken's extension of its sinuous legs
sent shivers of a dark despair
into the souls not only of the silently watching hens but also the roosters,
who felt a sudden sexual desire
for their exquisite comrade. The dark courage of the chicken was as
beautiful as drops of dew upon jade
at midnight, struck by a partial moon, its light filtered through clouds. One
of the deeply aroused roosters
could stand the intensity of the moment no more and bit off the head of the
beautiful, courageous chicken-
hero, whose wine blood was deliciously drunken by the road, and he died.
Johnny Cochran: The chicken never crossed the road. Some chicken-hating,
genocidal, lying public
official moved the road right under the chicken's feet while he was
practicing his golf swing and thinking
about his family.
Camus: The chicken's mother had just died. But this did not really upset
him, as any number of
witnesses can attest. In fact, he crossed just because the sun got in his
eyes.
Lord Nelson: "I see no chicken."
John Wayne: "'Cause a chicken's gotta do what a chicken's gotta do."
William Shakespeare: Tell me where lies fancy's egg, In the breast or in
the leg?
Douglas MacArthur: In order to return.
Richard Nixon: This isn't about roads and chickens. I don't think you quite
understand that what you
believe I may have meant isn't what you think I said.
Book of Genesis: God said, "Let there be chicken"; and there was chicken.
Then God said, "Let there be
road"; and there was road. And God commanded, "Let the one be taken to the
far side thereof." And it
was done. And God looked upon His work and saw that it was good.
Sirs William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan:
To verify through measurement and research explorational,
Asserted widths and properties of highways transportational.
And thus through brain and intellect did prove itself, this animal,
To be the very model of a modern chicken-general.
Sophocles: It wanted to be close to its Mom.