Why the chicken crossed the road, according to various entities
an uncontrollable need
When I started this blog, I promised myself that I would always steer into weirdness. (As they say, “Get busy being weird, or get busy dying.”) While time has shown there are limits to what y’all will tolerate [1 2 3 4] I still sometimes feel an uncontrollable need to publish something that’s pure exuberant stupidity.
Thus, I present:
WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD
ACCORDING TO VARIOUS PEOPLE
OR OTHER ENTITIES
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) The chicken ain’t fussy. Everybody gotta be somewhere. The chicken been on this side a long time and never suffered none for it. The chicken don’t see no obvious benefit to the other side. But the talk of the town is nothing but crossing, and the chicken can’t help but go see what got everyone so stirred up.
(Mark Twain)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) The outcome would be best if no one crossed. However, if other chickens do cross, then the outcome would be better if this chicken also crossed. The chicken rejects the Kantian universalism. So the chicken crosses.
(Derek Parfit)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) You were a beautiful little chick
The whole world was before you
You greased your wattles and crossed the road
Sure it would last foreverNow it’s a cold morning and you’re driving to work
Cursing all the cockerels in your way
How did you get here
Where did that little chick go
(Pink Floyd)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) It didn’t. There is no chicken. You are the road. You and the sides are in an entangled macrostate. The chicken is an emergent property of the superposition. The chicken abhors being measured. A team of plucky chemists rush to inject enough decoherence to collapse the wavefunction before the chicken can consume the lightcone.
(Christopher Nolan)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) Chicken
C H I C K E N
3, 8, 9, 3, 11, 5, 14
11, 9, 3, 8 14, 3, 5
gcd(11^(9 + 3) - 8, 14), 3 × 5
7, 15
G O
Go
(Ramanujan)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) For sex. Neither glamorized nor gross, possibly added for commercial reasons, possibly to make some point about sex’s place in real life. It’s all very unclear.
(Paul Thomas Anderson)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) Did it cross the road, though? Did it? Sure, the chicken is associated with crossing. And it’s mechanistically possible for a chicken to cross a road. It’s plausible the chicken crossed the road. But maybe the chicken and the crossing were both caused by something else. Or maybe the road crossed the chicken. This is why we have RCTs. Come on, people!
(Dynomight)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) Once there was a dragon who watched over the chicken village. The chickens begged the dragon, “Please let us have a road, so that we might cross back and forth!”
“A road?” the dragon asked. “Are you sure?”
“Yes!” the chickens answered. “A road! We wish for nothing but a road to cross, and then we will be happy forever and ever!”
[7000 words redacted]
And thus, all mass-energy in the universe was converted to chicken-torture annihilators. Makes you think.
(LessWrong)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) We were out on the edge of the farm when the diethyltryptamine took hold. Beaky screamed something about coccidiostats in our feed and made a break for it, totally out of control. Before I could stop him, I heard the voice of God say, “Scrapples: The road awaits.” Suddenly I was standing on the median, cars screaming past, a group a baby ducks asking where the mountains of peas I’d promised them were.
(Hunter S. Thompson)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) The chicken’s crossing is not a voluntary act but the unconscious actualization of a class habitus: raised in a coop whose symbolic boundaries naturalize the road as a site of danger and prestige, the chicken embodies the field’s doxa that “real” chickens must invest in the illusio of reaching the median. While the chicken never doubts the legitimacy of the crossing rules, crossing is not about the other side, but a performance of distinction that ultimately perpetuates the same field of species domination that produced it.
(Pierre Bourdieu)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) grug on one side
grug see other side
grug chicken
many metal box speed by very fast very volume
metal box seem to stay on black land strip
grug think better if metal box not hit grug because box hard and grug small soft chicken
grug wait a while
when no metal box for a while also often no metal box for a while after
largest gap between metal box around 20 minutes
grug wait until no metal box for 10 minutes then grug cross
no metal box come
grug safe
other side also fine
maybe cross back someday
grug think side not matter too much
grug enjoy chicken life either side same
chicken life pretty good
grug hope you also have life as good as grug chicken life
groodbye from grug
(grug)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) Before there was chicken the road was waiting. The road is empty. Dust on your hackles. Heat rises in shimmering waves. No way to see what’s coming. How did it come to this. How a chicken supposed to move with roads everywhere. Creosote blows in from the mesa. Nothing left but to cross. You cross and nothing happens. A few minutes later a car stops but you don’t turn around. A door opens and you hear a click. Then the car is gone.
(Cormac McCarthy)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) For food.
(An actual chicken)
Requests: Peter Singer, Ayn Rand, Judith Butler, Bertrand Russell, Andrei Tarkovsky, the mother hen, a junglefowl, an SSRI, Singapore, the chicken’s hypothalamus.
I asked Gemini 3 to write some of these, and I thought they were really good. Sorry for posting AI content.
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) The chicken, qua self-organizing system, must maintain the integrity of its Markov blanket against the dissipative forces of the second law of thermodynamics. By engaging in active inference, the chicken minimizes the variational free energy bounded by its internal model of the world. It does not "cross" in a teleological sense; rather, it acts to resolve the prediction error generated by the discrepancy between its sensory states (being on side A) and its generative model (a high-precision prior belief that it is, in fact, on side B). In short, the chicken crosses to avoid the surprise of not having crossed.
(Karl Friston)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) sniff
My God, this is pure ideology! tugs shirt
You ask why the chicken crosses the road, but this presupposes the existence of the road as a neutral space of transit. It is not! The road is the Lacanian Real—that which resists symbolization! The chicken does not want to get to the other side. The chicken crosses because it is terrified of the freedom it possesses on this side. It seeks the comfort of the prohibition. It is like the man who complains his wife is too controlling, yet when she leaves, he immediately hires a dominatrix. The chicken is the dominatrix of its own destiny.
sniff
And so on, and so on.
(Slavoj Žižek)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A)
Most people see a chicken.
I see a disruptor. 🚀
Everyone told the chicken, "Stay in the coop."
"The road is dangerous."
"You don't have the bandwidth."
The chicken didn't listen to the haters. The chicken didn't wait for permission. The chicken leveraged its core competencies (legs) to pivot to a new market (the other side).
5 lessons I learned from this chicken:
Comfort zones are dead zones.
Cross before you're ready.
Beak down, hustle up.
If you get hit by a car, that’s just a pivot to soup.
Synergy.
Agree? 👇
(A LinkedIn Influencer)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see no soul. You will see only the abyss. The overwhelming indifference of nature. The chicken crosses not out of bravery, and not out of hunger, but out of a monumental stupidity that screams into the void. The road is a line of death, and the chicken walks toward it with the blank, chaotic murder-stare of a creature that has forgotten it is alive. I believe the chicken crosses because it hates the road, and it hates itself, and it wishes to punish the pavement with its feet.
(Werner Herzog)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) This question has been marked as a duplicate. This has already been answered in [Thread 492: Mechanics of Avian Transit]. Please use the search bar before posting. Also, your question lacks code to reproduce the crossing environment. Thread closed.
(Stack Overflow Moderator)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) We have heard many lies about this road. The Fake News Media wants you to believe the chicken is stuck on one side. They say, "Oh, the chicken can't cross, it's too dangerous, the traffic is terrible." Wrong. It’s a beautiful chicken. Maybe the best chicken we’ve ever seen. And it crossed that road so fast, your head would spin. It crossed the road and the other side paid for it. We love our chickens, folks, don't we?
(Donald Trump)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the chicken race. By paving the earth with asphalt, the techno-industrial system has forced the chicken into unnatural biological feedback loops. The "crossing" is merely a surrogate activity—an artificial goal provided by the system to give the chicken the illusion of meaningful agency in a world stripped of wild autonomy.
(Ted Kaczynski)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) Does the current side of the road spark joy?
holds the chicken gently
Thank you, side of the road, for all the worms you have provided.
bows
Now we release the chicken to the other side, so it can live its best life.
(Marie Kondo)
Peter Singer: The chicken crossed the road, was hit by a car, and died painlessly. However, a new chicken immediately hatched on the other side. Since chickens lack biographical self-awareness and possess no future-oriented preferences, the total utility in the world remains unchanged. The real question isn't "why did the chicken cross the road"—it's why we're so sentimentally attached to _that particular_ chicken when _this_ chicken is experientially identical and equally capable of suffering.
[Full disclosure: I came up with the basic idea, and then asked Claude.ai for assistance in writing the comment.]