WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD? HERE ARE SOME PEOPLE'S GUESSES: Walt Whitman: To cluck the song of itself. Jack Nicholson: 'Cause it (censored) wanted to. That's the (censored) reason. John Paul Jones: It has not yet begun to cross! Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it. Aristotle: To actualize its potential. Roseanne Barr: Who cares? Someone go catch the little bastard and let's have a barbecue. Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road? William Shakespeare: I don't know why, but methinks I could rattle off a hundred-line soliloquy without much ado. Thomas Paine: Out of common sense. TS Eliot: Weialala leia / Wallala leialala. 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. Karl Marx: To escape the bourgeois middle-class struggle. Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated. Mr. Scott: 'Cos ma wee transporter beam was na functioning proprely. Ah canna work miracles, captain! Robert Frost: To cross the road less traveled by. Sigmund Freud: The chicken obviously was female and obviously interpreted the pole on which the crosswalk sign was mounted as a phallic symbol of which she was envious, selbstverstaendlich. William Wordsworth: To have something to recollect in tranquility. Caesar: To come, to see, to conquer. Bill the Cat: Oop Ack. Rene Descartes: It had sufficient reason to believe it was dreaming anyway. Leda: Are you sure it wasn't Zeus dressed up as a chicken? He's into that kind of thing, you know. Zsa Zsa Gabor: It probably crossed to get a better look at my legs, which thank goodness are good, dahling. George Bush: To face a kinder, gentler thousand points of headlights. Epicurus: For fun. TS Eliot revisited: Do I dare to cross the road? Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side. Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death. 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. Gregor Mendel: To get various strains of roads. Sisyphus: Was it pushing a rock, too? Salvador Dali: The Fish. Lee Iacocca: It found a better car, which was on the other side of the road. Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of life Mae West: I invited it to come up and see me sometime. Joseph Conrad: Mistah Chicken, he dead. Gerald R. Ford: It probably fell from an airplane and couldn't stop its forward momentum. Gottfried Von Leibniz: In this best possible world, the road was made for it to cross. Candide: To cultivate its garden. George Washington: Actually it crossed the Delaware with me back in 1776. But most history books don't reveal that I bunked with a birdie during the duration. Dylan Thomas: To not go (sic) gentle into that good night. David Hume: Out of custom and habit. John Milton: To justify the ways of God to men. James Tiberius Kirk: To boldly go where no chicken has gone before. 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! Thomas Dequincy: Because it ran out of opium. Socrates: To pick up some hemlock at the corner druggist. The Sphinx: You tell me. Adolf Hitler: It needed Lebensraum. Margaret Thatcher: There was no alternative. Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature. Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees. You see, chickens, over great periods of time, have been naturally selected in such a way that they are now genetically dispositioned to cross roads. Moses: Know ye that it is unclean to eat the chicken that has crossed the road, and that the chicken that crosseth the road doth so for its own preservation. Stan Laurel: I'm sorry, Ollie. It escaped when I opened the run. Michael Palin: Nobody expects the banished inky chicken! Basil Fawlty: Oh don't mind that chicken, it's from Barcelona. Machiavelli: The point is that the chicken crossed the road. Who cares why? The end justifies whatever motive there was. John Locke: Because he was exercising his natural right to liberty. Albert Camus: It doesn't matter; the chicken's actions have no meaning except to him. Freud: The fact that you thought that the chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity. Richard M. Nixon: The chicken did not cross the road. I repeat, the chicken did not cross the road. Martin Luther King, Jr.: I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question. Oliver Stone: The question is not "Why did the chicken cross the road?" but is rather "Who was crossing the road at the same time whom we overlooked in our haste to observe the chicken crossing?" Bill Clinton: (If the chicken is successful) It was my idea. Bill Clinton: (If the chicken is hit by a car) It was not my idea. Jerry Seinfeld: Why does anyone cross a road? I mean, why doesn't anyone ever think to ask, "What the heck was this chicken doing walking around all over the place anyway?" Fox Mulder: It was a government conspiracy. Louis Farrakhan: The road, you will see, represents the black man.. The white chicken crossed the "black man" in order to trample him and keep him down. Immanuel Kant: The chicken, being an autonomous being, chose to cross the road of his own free will. Grandpa: In my day, we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us that the chicken had crossed the road, and that was good enough for us. Ross Perot: These charts prove that we can no longer afford to allow chickens to cross the road. Erich Maria Remarque: The chicken crossed the road because, after his experience with war, he no longer felt at home in his home. Bill Gates: I have just released the new Chicken 2000, which will both cross roads AND balance your checkbook, though when it divides 3 by 2 it gets 1.4999999999. M.C.Escher: That depends on which plane of reality the chicken was on at the time. George Orwell: Because the government had fooled him into thinking that he was crossing the road of his own free will, when he was really only serving their interests. Colonel Sanders: I missed one? Plato: For the greater good. Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you. 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. Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road. Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.