Classic Answers to the Eternal Question: Why did the chicken cross the road?


Douglass Adams: 42

Aristotle: To actualize its potential.

Roseanne Barr: Urrrrrp. What chicken?

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

George Bush: To face a kinder, gentler thousand points of headlights.

Julius Caesar: To come, to see, to conquer.

Candide: To cultivate its garden.

Bill the Cat: Oop Ack.

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

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

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

Joseph Conrad: Mistah Chicken, he dead.

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 sapiens pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurrence.

Salvador Dali: The Fish.

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

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

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.

Thomas Dequincy: Because it ran out of opium.

Jacques Derrida: What is the *differance?* 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?

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

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

Bob Dylan: How many roads must one chicken cross?

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

TS Eliot: Weialala leia / Wallala leialala.

TS Eliot (revisited): Do I dare to cross the road?

Epicures: For fun.

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Robert Frost: To cross the road less traveled by.

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

Bill Gates: I have just released the new Chicken Office Y2000, which will not only cross roads, but it will lay eggs, file your important documents AND balance your checkbook. Unfortunately, when it divides 3 by 2 it gets 1.4999999999.

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!

Johann Friedrich von 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 he had and that was good enough for us.

Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

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

Adolf Hitler: It needed Lebensraum.

David Hume: Out of custom and habit.

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

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

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

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

Immanuel Kant: Because it was a duty.

Martin Luther King: It had a dream.

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

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

Jacques Lacan: Because of its desire for *object a*.

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

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

Gottfried Von Leibniz: In this best possible world, the road was made for it to cross.

Machiavelli: The point is that the chicken crossed the road. Who cares why? The end of crossing the road justifies whatever motive there was.

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.

Karl Marx: To escape the bourgeois middle-class struggle.

Karl Marx: It was historical inevitability.

Gregor Mendel: To get various strains of roads.

John Milton: To justify the ways of God to men.

Moses: And God came down from heaven, and he said unto the chicken, "Thou shalt cross the road." and the chicken did cross the road, and there was much rejoicing.

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

Fox 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?

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

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

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

Oliver North: National security was at stake.

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....

Thomas Paine : Out of common sense.

Michael Palin: Nobody expects the banished inky chicken!

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

Plato: for the greater good.

Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?

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.

Ronald Reagan: I forget.

Georg Friedrich Riemann: The answer appears in Dirichlet's lectures.

Colonel Sanders: I missed one?????

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

Jerry Seinfeld: Why does anyone cross a road? I mean, why doesn't any ever think to ask 'what was this chicken doing out of his pen walking around all over the place anyway?'

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

Sisyphus: Was it pushing a rock, too?

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

The Sphinx: You tell me.

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

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

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

Margaret Thatcher: There was no alternative.

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

Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of life.

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

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.

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.

Molly Yard: It was a hen!

Henny Youngman: Take this chicken ... please.

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


As far as I know, this is the complete "Why did the chicken cross the road" list. If I'm missing any, please let me know.



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