FUNNY PAGES

Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?

05/28/96

Plato
     For the greater good.

Karl Marx
     It was a 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 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.

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.

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 one or
     two have crossed roads for whatever reason, most never get a
     chance. Of course, this is not what we are. 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)

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

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 necessitated
     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.

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

Aristotle
     To actualize its potential.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Pyrrho the Skeptic
     What road?

Ronald Reagan
     I forget.

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

The Sphinx
     You tell me.

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.

Catherine MacKinnon
     Because, in this patriarchal 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.

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.

Joseph Stalin
     I don't care. Catch it. I need its eggs to make my omlette.

Malcolm X
     It was coming home to roost.