The Other Side

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I feel confident in asserting that you, dear reader, have heard the following joke–

Why did the chicken cross the road?

To get to the other side.

I feel almost as confident in the assertion that you never really got the joke.

Bear with me a moment. The Wikipedia entry on said witticism reads–

“It 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.”

Fair enough. This is the way I interpreted this joke for some 50 years now. This is the joke, right?

According to the same article, this riddle first appeared in print in 1847, in the New York monthly magazine Knickerbocker. That’s over 150 years ago. So here we are a century and a half later and … we still don’t get the joke.

Not until an 11-year old girl visited our house for a sleep-over with my step-daughter was the riddle finally, and definitively, solved.

“Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“To get to the other side.”

“Do you get it?” she says. “The chicken committed suicide.”

My wife and I watched each other as we both went through exactly the same mental process–

Wait. What? Oh! Huh.

Then we both just nodded and said–“Yeah, that’s right”–too shocked to respond in any other way until minutes later. The girls had moved on to other things.

“The Other Side,” I said. “I’ve heard that joke hundreds of times. In fifty years, that never once occurred to me.”

She nodded, her eyes wide with wonder. “I know!” 

We laughed.

It’s not–to get to the other side … of the road.

It’s–to get to the Other Side.

It’s a pun. A dark, grim, and pretty darn clever little pun.

Now you may very well argue that, although this is an interesting interpretation, it’s not really the intent of the joke. To you I say–

No, no, no, you’re wrong. When I was a boy, everything was right.

Actually that’s a Beatles lyric. I say–

Imagine yourself in New York City, 1847. This is the dawn of what became known as the Spiritualism movement. After brewing just under the surface for a century, in the wake of Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer, Spiritualism burst onto the scene in full force. When? The 1840’s. Where? New York.

The same year that the ‘Chicken’ was published, Andrew Jackson Davis published the seminal work of the Spiritualist movement–The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind. Just one year later the Fox Sisters became world famous after claiming to have spoken with the spirit of a murdered peddler.

The Other Side. 

This was the zeitgeist of the time.

When this joke was originally published, and throughout the subsequent one hundred years–the hey-day of Spiritualism, Mediums, and the parlor seance–the Other Side was surely well understood. Despite the fact that it’s lost much of its resonance, the joke’s longevity undoubtedly owes a tremendous debt to the cultural obsession surrounding its birth.

In any case, whether we believe in the Other Side or not, neither you nor I will ever hear this joke the same way again.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

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