The Chicken Joke: A Close Reading

What is the most famous joke in our culture? The one that would be most people’s automatic, instinctive response if they were asked to give an example of a joke. The one that was quite possibly the first joke we heard as children (or at least the first one we remember hearing). The one that is so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche that it is almost synonymous with the very concept of joke.

It’s got to be this: “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.”

And yet - that really isn’t a joke at all. It’s an anti-joke. Which I find absolutely fascinating for a number of reasons.

The whole point of the chicken-crossing-the-road joke is that it takes the typical structure of a joke and violates it. Instead of a humorous answer to the question, we get a literal answer. Yes, the most common and obvious reason why one would cross a road is, indeed, to get to the other side. And if that is funny at all (it certainly isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, at least not to me), it’s ostensibly because it subverts our expectations. The set-up makes us anticipate one thing; the punchline gives us something different. That’s kind of the whole point of comedy.

But with the Chicken Joke – again, our number one go-to example of a “joke” – that’s not really what’s going on, is it? Think about a young child hearing this joke for the first time. He or she probably doesn’t have much of the context needed to fully appreciate it. In fact, since the joke is so ubiquitous – not to mention associated in our minds with childhood – he or she may not have heard any jokes of this kind before hearing the Chicken Joke. That means there are no expectations present within the child for the anti-joke to subvert or violate.

Aww, look at him go!

And yet, it’s not like kids hear the Chicken Joke and think that it is a straightforward question-and-answer. They do understand it as a joke. I mean, sometimes they even laugh at it. So that means that they are literally learning the structure of this type of joke from something that presupposes their familiarity with it. Which is a pretty complex cognitive process if you think about it. And I think that it has implications for the way we understand learning.

Maybe you really don’t have to understand the basics of a subject before you can appreciate something that relies upon those basics. Or maybe being exposed to something that presupposes an understanding of the basics is itself a way to apprehend them. That is: maybe you don’t have to walk before you can run; maybe running is a way of learning how to walk.

I remember once, when I was maybe nine years old or so, I was watching an episode of Boy Meets World with my dad. It was the episode where Cory and his class watch some outdated movie about puberty. And Cory is making a point about how outdated the movie was, so he says something like, “The delivery guy was played by George Burns!” Cue the laugh track. And cue nine-year-old me, lying on my couch, laughing as well.

My dad looked at me. “Do you even know who George Burns is?”

I didn’t. (Though I’m sure I lied to my dad and pretended that I did.) And sure, you could take this little anecdote as illustrative of the power of laugh tracks, or the stupidity of human beings and our Pavlovian response to anything that is supposed to be funny. But I think it’s more than that. It’s also true that the experience of hearing that joke taught me who George Burns was in some sense. At least, it taught me that he was an old actor, someone whose name you would invoke to make the point that something was really old. And that is all the context you need to appreciate Cory’s joke.

So a truer answer to my dad’s question might have been, “I do now!”

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This is George Burns. Or maybe

it's not. You're not gonna look it up.

Another thing I find interesting about the phenomenon of the Chicken Joke is how we have responded to it. We have constructed traditional jokes based on it, like this: “Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide.” This relies on our being familiar with the original Chicken Joke - or else we would not appreciate the rhyme of side and slide. And in this case, for whatever reason, I don’t think we could grasp that necessary contextual information from hearing the joke that presupposes it.

Or there’s this one: “Why did the turkey cross the road? It was the chicken’s day off.” To someone who had never heard the Chicken Joke (as hard as that is to even imagine), this would probably just sound absurd. Or would it? Maybe the experience of hearing this joke would allow someone to deduce that there must be something about a chicken and a road that they were expected to know. I guess this whole thing is rather nuanced.

Then there are those who have reinterpreted the Chicken Joke entirely. I remember this one post that was making the rounds on social media at one point, wherein the poster “realized” that the true meaning of “to get to the other side” was “to get to the afterlife.” This kind of reminds me of those edgy posts about children’s shows where every Winnie the Pooh character is reimagined as a manifestation of mental illness, or Angelica is actually hallucinating the rest of the Rugrats or whatever else. Except those are (usually) deliberate reinterpretations, whereas the one about the Chicken Joke makes it sound like this was always the meaning of the joke. Which makes me suspect that the poster – and all those who enthusiastically shared the post – never fully grasped that the Chicken Joke was an anti-joke. So I wonder: what the hell did they think it was all this time?

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"All black everything"

I also think it’s significant that, when we think joke, we actually think of something that was originally a subversion of the concept of a joke. There is something similar about the way we think about art. Or at least Art with a capital A. When I read that word, the image that comes into my head is just as likely to be some sort of Dada or Abstract Expressionist or Minimalist painting as it is to be something more traditional like da Vinci or even Picasso. And yet those movements were originally conceptualized as anti-Art. But they have become Art, at least to most non-artists. When people say they don’t understand Art or dislike its pretentions, that is invariably what they are referring to.

This happens in every medium, of course. The revolutionary, over time, becomes the new establishment – thereby necessitating a new revolution. It’s like what David Foster Wallace said about postmodern irony and cynicism: “Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the US has now been done and redone . . . Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving.” And so he advocated for a return to sincerity in literature. (Now, I’ve never actually read any of his books so I can’t say whether he was successful in this. But I do like the idea. And Infinite Jest is one superlong entry on the superlong list of books I’ve been meaning to read.)

But with humor, it almost seems like we have reached a point where no further revolution is possible. The anti-joke has become synonymous with the joke. It’s kind of like the end of Animal Farm – looking from pig to man, man to pig (or chicken, as the case may be) and it becomes impossible to tell the difference.

Now, I don’t know if that’s a bad thing, necessarily. But it certainly is interesting.