A Critique of ‘Why did the chicken cross the road’ by Yonza the Barbarian

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: To get to the other side.

There is a flaw in this joke. Let’s unpack it a bit to see why someone might mistakenly think it is funny.

Below I divide the joke into three events ordered chronologically.

(1) The joke teller (JT) asks a sincere question.
(2) The joke receiver (JR) hears the question, and thus develops a prima facie expectation that he will hear the answer to the question. Furthermore, JR develops an expectation – an expectation which is not semantically suggested by the question --- that the answer will provide him with some degree of knowledge that JR theretofore does not have. The prima facie expectation is expected because of the semantic structure of the question i.e. the “Why” implies that there is some answer that exists. The question, however, never explicitly calls for a knowledge-bestowing answer, but a knowledge-bestowing answer is expected due to general rules of conversation (that is, we expect that when we hear the answer to a question we gain information from the answer).
(3) The prima facie expectation is satisfied since the question was answered, but the conversational expectation of knowledge-bestowing is not satisfied since the joke itself, which premises the whole exchange on the fact that the chicken, in fact, did cross the road, already bestowed anything to be found in the answer in the question -- JR already knows that the chicken got to the other side by the time the answer is told; he knows from definitional deduction (i.e. “getting to the other side” is a concept that is contained in the set of the concepts in “chicken crosses the road”). This creates a “Well yea but that doesn’t tell me anything” cognitive milieu and it is this milieu that people consider humorous (even if you don’t laugh, there is still something that sort of clicks with an essence of humor when this milieu is induced).

Now that we see why the joke is [mistakenly] considered humorous, we can pinpoint the flaw; it is contained in step (3). One crucial part of step (3) is that we admit “getting to the other side” is a concept contained under “Chicken crosses the road.” The flaw is that the concept “getting to the other side” is not what the answer to the question is, the answer to the question is “ to get to the other side.” This first “to” that precedes “get” is crucial. To see the difference compare the two sentences

“The chicken that crossed the road got to the other side”

“The chicken crossed the road to get to other side”

The first sentence is more like what the joke should be, while the second sentence is what the joke is. The difference between these two sentences is that the first is purely scientific or descriptive, while the second sentence contains an alleged purposive action. The concept “chicken crosses the road” does contain “chicken gets to the other side” since a chicken that crossed the road must get to the other side because if it didn’t get to the other side then it would not have crossed the road. However, the chicken needn’t have had crossed the road “ [in order] to get to the other side.” In other words he needn’t have had crossed the road with the purpose of getting to the other side. For example, would you say that the pilgrims crossed the Atlantic to get to the other side? If you said “yes” you are wrong. They crossed to escape religious persecution; getting to the other side was incidental. To make the point clearer take the case of a surgeon: would you say that a surgeon performs surgery to stab someone’s body? Certainly not (I hope). The purpose is to cure someone of a sickness, and the stabbing is not only incidental but undesired (if docs could perform surgery without an incision they would).

The fact is, just because you did something doesn’t mean you did it purposively. So there is the flaw: since it is not necessarily the case that the chicken crossed the road to get to the other side the answer actually does bestow knowledge on JR, and thus makes step (3) ineffectual. The piece of knowledge you gain is that the chicken crossed the road for the purpose of getting to the other side. So you might have the following exchange

JT: Why did the chicken cross the road?
JR: Dunno
JT: To get to the other side
JR: Interesting. You know, I would have thought that the reason the chicken crossed the road was to escape avian persecution, but ya’ live ya’ learn.

But there is a shining ray of hope in all this. The fact is the intended funniness of the joke could still be constructed simply by altering a few words. The following is the edited, perfected, minted version of the classic quip:

JT: What happened when the chicken crossed the road?
JR: Dunno
JT: It got to the other side
JR: Oh, you jokster!