Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?
"Why did the chicken cross the road?" is a common riddle or joke in several languages. The answer or punchline is: "To get to the other side." The riddle is an example of anti-humor, in that the curious setup of the joke leads the listener to expect a traditional punchline, but they are instead given a simple statement of fact. "Why did the chicken cross the road?" has become largely iconic as an exemplary generic joke to which most people know the answer, and has been repeated and changed numerous times.
The riddle was mentioned in print in 1847, in The Knickerbocker, a New York City monthly magazine:
- ...There are 'quips and quillets' which seem actual conundrums, but yet are none. Of such is this: 'Why does a chicken cross the street? Are you 'out of town?' Do you 'give it up?' Well, then: 'Because it wants to get on the other side!'
The joke had become widespread by the 1890s, when a variant version appeared in the magazine Potter's American Monthly:
- Why should not a chicken cross the road?
- It would be a fowl proceeding.
Read more about Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?: Variations
Famous quotes containing the words the road?, chicken and/or cross:
“As life runs on, the road grows strange
With faces new,—and near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
‘Neath every one a friend.”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)
“‘Yesterday I saw God. What did he look like? Well, in the
afternoon I climbed up a ladder—he as a cheap cabin in the
country, like Monroe, NY the chicken farms in the wood. He was a lonely old man with a white beard.”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)
“It is an agreeable change to cross a lake, after you have been shut up in the woods, not only on account of the greater expanse of water, but also of sky. It is one of the surprises which Nature has in store for the traveler in the forest. To look down, in this case, over eighteen miles of water, was liberating and civilizing even.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)