The Never-Ending Question
Q: “Why did the chicken cross the road?”
A: “To get to the other side!”
Being a joke, you expect some sort of funny response to the question, but the answer is very obvious. Interestingly, the question first appeared in an 1847 issue of a New York City magazine called The Knickerbocker , which used it as an example of what is known as “anti-humor” – a quip that, despite seeming like a riddle or a trick question, is just a straightforward, unamusing fact or solution. The full quote was: “Here 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!’”.
LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers laughs as he speaks on a set during the Los Angeles Lakers Media Day at the UCLA Health Training Center on September 24, 2018 in El Segundo, California. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)
Not very funny by today’s standards but, soon after, it was modified to become an actual joke and, in 1890, a pun version appeared in the magazine Potter’s American Monthly : “Why should not a chicken cross the road? It would be a fowl proceeding.” Many variations and subversions have been invented since, playing on assumptions of familiarity with this well-known joke: for example, a dinosaur crosses “because chickens didn’t exist yet” and a duck crosses “because it was the chicken’s day off.”