Not to embarrass her but to give her proper credit, I shall call the discoverer of the following superb sequence of jocular philosophical answers to the age old question about the chicken Ms. Scott. Reprinted here following much laughter and with sincere gratitude for sharing her excellent humor with all the subscribers to BIRDCHAT.
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.
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.
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.
Robert Frost: To cross the road less traveled by.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Sir Isaac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to cross the road.
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.
Captain James Tiberius Kirk: To boldly go where no chicken has gone before.
Sophocles: It wanted to be close to its Mom.
Peace and good bird watching.
(Disclaimer: celebrity answers impersonated.)
