\par Date:\tab \tab Saturday, February 17, 1996 10:08 PM
\par To:\tab \tab Joke Archives
\par Subject:\tab \tab Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?
\par 
\par  Plato:
\par       For the greater good.
\par  
\par  Karl Marx:
\par       It was a historical inevitability.
\par  
\par  Hamlet:
\par       Because 'tis better to suffer in the mind the slings and arrows
\par       of outrageous road maintenance than to take arms against a sea
\par       of oncoming vehicles.
\par  
\par  Doug Hofstadter:
\par       To seek explication of the correspondence between appearance
\par       and essence through the mapping of the external road-object
\par       onto the internal road-concept.
\par  
\par  Machiavelli:
\par       So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken
\par       which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but
\par       also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend
\par       with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the
\par       princely chicken's dominion maintained.
\par  
\par  Hippocrates:
\par       Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.
\par  
\par  H.P. Lovecraft:
\par       To futilely attempt escape from the dark powers which even then
\par       pursued it, hungering after the stuff of its soul!
\par  
\par  Jacques Derrida:
\par       Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within
\par       the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each
\par       interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can
\par       never be discerned, because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT,
\par       DEAD!
\par  
\par  Thomas de Torquemada:
\par       Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out.
\par  
\par  Robert Anton Wilson:
\par       Because agents of the Ancient Illuminated Roosters of Cooperia
\par       were controlling it with their Orbital Mind-Control Lasers as
\par       part of their master plan to take over the world's egg
\par       production.
\par  
\par  Timothy Leary:
\par       Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment would
\par       let it take.
\par  
\par  Douglas Adams:
\par       Forty-two.
\par  
\par  Nietzsche:
\par       Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes
\par       also across you.
\par  
\par  Aleister Crowley:
\par       Because it was its True Will to do so.
\par  
\par  Oliver North:
\par       National Security was at stake.
\par  
\par  Sappho:
\par       For the touch of your skin, the sweetness of your lips...
\par  
\par  J.R.R. Tolkien:
\par       The chicken, sunlight coruscating off its radiant yellow-white
\par       coat of feathers, approached the dark, sullen asphalt road and
\par       scrutinized it intently with its obsidian-black eyes. Every
\par       detail of the thoroughfare leapt into blinding focus: the rough
\par       texture of the surface, over which countless tires had worked
\par       their relentless tread through the ages; the innumerable
\par       fragments of stone embedded within the lugubrious mass, perhaps
\par       quarried from the great pits where the Sons of Man labored not
\par       far from here; the dull black asphalt itself, exuding those
\par       waves of heat which distort the sight and bring weakness to the
\par       body; the other attributes of the great highway too numerous to
\par       give name.
\par  
\par       And then it crossed it.
\par  
\par  Malcolm X:
\par       Because it would get across that road by any means necessary.
\par  
\par  B.F. Skinner:
\par       Because the external influences which had pervaded its
\par       sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion
\par       that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these
\par       actions to be of its own free will.
\par  
\par  Carl Jung:
\par       The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated
\par       that individual chickens cross roads at this historical
\par       juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such
\par       occurrences into being.
\par  
\par  Gary Gygax:
\par       Because I rolled a 64 on the "Chicken Random Behaviors" chart
\par       on page 497 of the Dungeon Master's Guide.
\par   
\par  Dorothy Parker:
\par       Travel, trouble, music, art / A kiss, a frock, a rhyme / The
\par       chicken never said they fed its heart / But still they pass its
\par       time.
\par  
\par  T.S. Eliot:
\par       It's not that they cross, but that they cross like chickens.\
\

\par  
\par  Jean-Paul Sartre:
\par       In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the
\par       chicken found it necessary to cross the road.
\par  
\par  Jean-Luc Picard:
\par       To see what's out there.
\par  
\par  Darth Vader:
\par       Because it could not resist the power of the Dark Side.
\par  
\par  Ludwig Wittgenstein:
\par       The possibility of "crossing" was encoded into the objects
\par       "chicken" and "road", and circumstances came into being which
\par       caused the actualization of this potential occurrence.
\par  
\par  John Constantine:
\par       Because it'd made a bollocks of things over on this side of the
\par       road and figured it'd better get out right quick.
\par  
\par  Albert Einstein:
\par       Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the
\par       chicken depends upon your frame of reference.
\par  
\par  Gandalf:
\par       O chicken, do not meddle in the affairs of roads, for you are
\par       tasty and good with barbecue sauce.
\par  
\par  Baldrick:
\par       It had a cunning plan.
\par  
\par  Aristotle:
\par       To actualize its potential.
\par  
\par  Roseanne Barr:
\par       Urrrrrp. What chicken?
\par  
\par  Candide:
\par       To cultivate its garden.
\par  
\par  Buddha:
\par       If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.
\par  
\par  Joseph Conrad:
\par       Mistah Chicken, he dead.
\par  
\par  Salvador Dali:
\par       The Fish.
\par  
\par  Darwin:
\par       It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.
\par  
\par  Rene Descartes:
\par       It had sufficient reason to believe it was dreaming anyway.
\par  
\par  Emily Dickinson:
\par       Because it could not stop for death.
\par  
\par  Bob Dylan:
\par       How many roads must one chicken cross?
\par  
\par  Epicurus:
\par       For fun.
\par  
\par  Paul Erdos:
\par       It was forced to do so by the chicken-hole principle.
\par  
\par  Ralph Waldo Emerson:
\par       It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.
\par  
\par  Basil Fawlty:
\par       Oh, don't mind that chicken. It's from Barcelona.
\par  
\par  Gerald R. Ford:
\par       It probably fell from an airplane and couldn't stop its forward
\par       momentum.
\par  
\par  Sigmund Freud:
\par       The chicken obviously was female and obviously interpreted the
\par       pole on which the crosswalk sign was mounted as a phallic
\par       symbol of which she was envious, selbstverstaendlich.
\par  
\par  Robert Frost:
\par       To cross the road less traveled by.
\par  
\par  Johann Friedrich von Goethe:
\par       The eternal hen-principle made it do it.
\par  
\par  Ernest Hemingway:
\par       To die. In the rain.
\par  
\par  Werner Heisenberg:
\par       We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but
\par       it was moving very fast.
\par  
\par  Adolf Hitler:
\par       It needed Lebensraum.
\par  
\par  David Hume:
\par       Out of custom and habit.
\par  
\par  Saddam Hussein:
\par       This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite
\par       justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.
\par  
\par  Lee Iacocca:
\par       It found a better car, which was on the other side of the road.
\par  
\par  John Paul Jones:
\par       It has not yet begun to cross!
\par  
\par  Martin Luther King:
\par       It had a dream.
\par  
\par  James Tiberius Kirk:
\par       To boldly go where no chicken has gone before.
\par  
\par  Stan Laurel:
\par       I'm sorry, Ollie. It escaped when I opened the run.
\par  
\par  Leda:
\par       Are you sure it wasn't Zeus dressed up as a chicken? He's into
\par       that kind of thing, you know.
\par  
\par  Gottfried Von Leibniz:
\par       In this best possible world, the road was made for it to cross.
\par  
\par  Groucho Marx:
\par       Chicken? What's all this talk about chicken? Why, I had an
\par       uncle who thought he was a chicken. My aunt almost divorced
\par       him, but we needed the eggs.
\par  
\par  Karl Marx:
\par       To escape the bourgeois middle-class struggle.
\par  
\par  Gregor Mendel:
\par       To get various strains of roads.
\par  
\par  John Milton:
\par       To justify the ways of God to men.
\par  
\par  Sir Isaac Newton:
\par       Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend
\par       to cross the road.
\par  
\par  Jack Nicholson:
\par       'Cause it (censored) wanted to. That's the (censored) reason.
\par  
\par  Thomas Paine:
\par       Out of common sense.
\par  
\par  Michael Palin:
\par       Nobody expects the banished inky chicken!
\par  
\par  Wolfgang Pauli:
\par       There already was a chicken on the other side of the road.
\par  
\par  Pyrrho the Skeptic:
\par       What road?
\par  
\par  Ronald Reagan:
\par       I forget.
\par  
\par  Georg Friedrich Riemann:
\par       The answer appears in Dirichlet's lectures.
\par  
\par  John Sununu:
\par       The Air Force was only too happy to provide the transportation,
\par       so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of the
\par       opportunity.
\par  
\par  Sisyphus:
\par       Was it pushing a rock, too?
\par  
\par  Socrates:
\par       To pick up some hemlock at the corner druggist.
\par  
\par  The Sphinx:
\par       You tell me.
\par  
\par  Margaret Thatcher:
\par       There was no alternative.
\par  
\par  Dylan Thomas:
\par       To not go (sic) gentle into that good night.
\par  
\par  Henry David Thoreau:
\par       To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of life.
\par  
\par  Mark Twain:
\par       The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.
\par  
\par  Mae West:
\par      I invited it to come up and see me sometime.
\par  
\par  Walt Whitman:
\par       To cluck the song of itself.
\par  
\par  William Wordsworth:
\par       To have something to recollect in tranquility.
\par  
\par  Molly Yard:
\par       It was a hen!
\par  
\par  Henny Youngman:
\par       Take this chicken ... please.
\par  
\par  Zeno of Elea:
\par       To prove it could never reach the other side.
\par  
\par  Mr. Scott:
\par       'Cos ma wee transporter beam was na functioning properly. Ah
\par       canna work miracles, Captain!
\par  
\par  Howard Cosell:
\par       It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events
\par       to grace the annals of history. An historic, unprecedented
\par       avian biped with the temerity to attempt such an herculean
\par       achievement formerly relegated to homo sapien pedestrians is
\par       truly a remarkable occurrence.
\par  
\par Author Unknown
\par