Not long after the initial December 2006 issue of this post (this is a slightly modified, corrected and updated revision), I published additional information<\/a>\u00a0in March 2007.<\/p>\n I also described more recently: The\u00a01,000, 000 Google pages meme<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n As a matter of fact, the first step was to start my dear Google<\/a> (and Altavista<\/a>) to try\u00a0and find more easily the roots of the meme. The story is so commonly known here that looking in the Internet seemed the natural way. And I nearly immediately\u00a0understood how much bigger it was than I thought. What I imagined a\u00a0nice humoristic idea (but a recent one) quickly appeared as much older.<\/p>\n I started naturally (I’m French) digging into French versions. Up to\u00a0July 2000, French language seem to simply ignore the mere existence of the Consequently, I made the hypothesys (an easy one on the Internet) that\u00a0the origin was to be looked for in the English language and that French\u00a0occurrences were only late translations and extensions (several answers rely deeply on common French cultural background, though). Actually, you may find thousands\u00a0of web pages web titled “Why did the chicken cross the road?”\u00a0and updated in the second half of 2000.<\/p>\n So the search went on deeper in the past.<\/p>\n In the second half of 1996, hypertext versions (in HTML) are uncommon,\u00a0but text-only versions appear quite often. But in 1992, there is no longer\u00a0any reference to our brave chicken. In December 1993, according to Altavista<\/a>\u00a0we see the first apparition on the personal web site of Lori and Michael Blake: www.frogtown.com\/~mblake\/text-files\/humor\/Music.Humor<\/a>.<\/p>\n Note: At the same time, I could find a blonde joke (Yes! as early as that)\u00a0with interesting common traits even though it is set deep in the middle\u00a0of other jokes:<\/p>\n [http:\/\/www.scc.net\/~ytrah\/txt\/ALLBLOND.TXT<\/a>]<\/p>\n Now, seeing so many of these text-only cases (no web page formatting),\u00a0I hypothesized that the rarefaction could come from the youth of this\u00a0media (web is often considered as born in 1989) and from the scarcity of web archives\u00a0dating back to this time. But, there is a place where we can go much further\u00a0back in time: Usenet newsgroups. Google<\/a> has the great advantage of being a good archive easily searchable using the public\u00a0search engine. I thus jumped into this next phase.<\/p>\n Again, the History counter jumped back several years with 19 references\u00a0found between 1981 and 1989 in various newsgroups including the most probable\u00a0rec.humor<\/a> (fully dedicated to jokes and humor\u00a0from its inception). And from all these references we can draw interesting\u00a0remarks.<\/p>\n We can imagine an elephant joke gone loose with a humorist following on\u00a0the new trail of a chicken but adding the series of interesting answers.\u00a0But the theme of crossing the road is already well alive in 1992. It leads\u00a0to neat variants since we identify an elephant and a blond. In both cases,\u00a0the reason for crossing is unclear to the audience. For the elephant,\u00a0the answer is the traditional incoherent humor; For Moebius, there is the\u00a0addition of a star figure of geeks<\/i> and other hackers<\/i>.<\/p>\n The jump to more literary answers is not an obvious one and seem to point\u00a0to an individual who sort of created a bridge between two universes (even\u00a0if true hackers<\/i> always insisted on drawing from a much larger cultural base than what folklore would lead us to think).<\/p>\n Do the philosophical explanations appears at the end of 1993? It’s difficult\u00a0to be affirmative. But, taking into account the scarcity of available\u00a0data, it is tempting to imagine a philosophy lover extending the already\u00a0existing idea from a common anglo-saxon humor meme to a more sophisticated\u00a0level.<\/p>\n I finally could find an old indirect reference to a BASIC language computer\u00a0game written in 1982 thus described:<\/p>\n There, we immediately see all the original elements of the joke except\u00a0the list of explanations and the literary references. It seems to confirm\u00a0the very old age of the original meme of a chicken crossing the road for\u00a0a confusing reason.<\/p>\n The\u00a0reference\u00a0web site: WhyDidTheChickenCrossTheRoad.com<\/a>\u00a0(at least, this is the one with most answers to the question we explored).<\/p>\nHow?<\/h3>\n
\nchicken (poule<\/i> or poulet<\/i>, in French). But it can be found\u00a0on web sites like http:\/\/www.chez.com\/freetimes\/philo.htm<\/a>\u00a0or alprerkillersite.ifrance.com\/surlespoules.htm\u00a0<\/a>updated in the second half of 2000. At this time, the chicken has seriously philosophical reasons to cross the road. The answer is given by Plato,\u00a0Karl Marx, Douglas Hofstadter or Machiavel. The diversity from these two\u00a0examples immediately shows that they are absolutely not primary sources\u00a0but variations from a possibly common origin, but both deeply modified.<\/p>\n268. Q: Why did the blonde cross the road?\r\n A: Never mind that! What was she doing out of the bedroom?!?\r\n R: I don't know.\r\n A: Neither did she.<\/pre>\n
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Why did the elephant cross the road? \r\nChicken's day off.<\/pre>\n
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Q: Why did the chicken cross the Moebius strip? \r\nA: To get to the other ... er, um ...<\/pre>\n
First hypothesis<\/h3>\n
![\"Chicken](\"https:\/\/www.roumazeilles.net\/news\/en\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/296-12430283285H3V-300x225.jpg\")
This jump is all the more remarkable knowing that in 1994, there is\u00a0no real “why did the chicken cross the road?” list and only\u00a0elephants are joke subjects on Usenet (at least in a context similar to\u00a0what we are looking for). It’s only in 1995 that we really see chickens\u00a0crossing roads or streets, and always around fans of the Star Trek series.<\/p>\nJumping forward into the past again<\/h3>\n
Chicken -- A Great Game:\r\n Why did the chicken cross the road?\r\n To lay an egg.\r\nActually, our chicken is trying to score points by getting safely\r\nacross this busy highway. Each time he makes it adds to his score, but\r\nthe cars go faster and faster. If he gets hit, the SPCA sends an ambulance\r\nand the cops slow the traffic for a while.<\/pre>\n
References<\/h3>\n