{"id":671,"date":"2007-03-07T17:37:38","date_gmt":"2007-03-07T16:37:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.roumazeilles.net\/news\/en\/wordpress\/2007\/03\/07\/why-did-the-chicken-cross-the-road-prequel\/"},"modified":"2020-11-25T18:02:27","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T16:02:27","slug":"why-did-the-chicken-cross-the-road-prequel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roumazeilles.net\/news\/en\/wordpress\/2007\/03\/07\/why-did-the-chicken-cross-the-road-prequel\/","title":{"rendered":"Why did the chicken cross the road? Prequel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Those of you who read my little History (or historiogrpahic) exercise about the old &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.roumazeilles.net\/news\/en\/wordpress\/2017\/11\/24\/why-did-the-chicken-cross-the-road-the-story-of-a-meme\/\">Why did the chicken cross the road?<\/a>&#8221; joke may remember that did not succeed moving back in time very far because of the limitations of Internet search engines. So, I was concluding that the story was older than 1981.<\/p>\n<p>After that, Alex (from Belgium) told me that he had heard the joke in <em>Sesame Street<\/em> as broadcasted in Europe.<\/p>\n<p><em>Otheus<\/em> provided me with some additional elements that I wanted to share with you here and now. First, he found an additonal reference (very clear and precise) to <a href=\"http:\/\/groups.google.com\/group\/net.jokes.d\/browse_thread\/thread\/f9519b66c282a507\/9d75b99dfa5f3656?lnk=st&amp;q=&amp;rnum=2&amp;hl=en#9d75b99dfa5f3656\">the travelling chicken joke<\/a> dating back to 1984. But, much more importantly, he discovered in Usenet a marvellous unadultered reference back to a 1919 publication:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>And so, you see now, fellas &#8212; just why the chicken crossed the road&#8221; &#8212; prompting the oysters, &#8220;these mild minded children of the sea, susceptible to humor, [to] give vent to unrestrained laughter, wide, and open&#8221; their mouths, letting the mice prop them open with twigs (so they can&#8217;t flee to the sea to escape, lest they drown).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Everything points to a joke that was already well known then (in the beginning of 20th Century) since George Herriman could re-use it without hesitation in &#8220;Krazy Kat&#8221; dated Sunday, July 27, 1919.<\/p>\n<p>What would be quite interesting to notice is that the joke (and the associated meme) did not really evolve from 1919 (or before) until the 1980&#8217;s. But Internet diffusion happened simultaneously to a radical change with the creation of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.roumazeilles.net\/news\/en\/wordpress\/2017\/11\/24\/why-did-the-chicken-cross-the-road-the-story-of-a-meme\/\">the many variations<\/a> that we know today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Those of you who read my little History (or historiogrpahic) exercise about the old &#8220;Why did the chicken cross the road?&#8221; joke may remember that did not succeed moving back in time very far because of the limitations of Internet search engines. So, I was concluding that the story was older than 1981. After that, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,25,29,35,14,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-entertainment","category-internet","category-sciences","category-social-issues","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roumazeilles.net\/news\/en\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roumazeilles.net\/news\/en\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roumazeilles.net\/news\/en\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roumazeilles.net\/news\/en\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roumazeilles.net\/news\/en\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roumazeilles.net\/news\/en\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roumazeilles.net\/news\/en\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roumazeilles.net\/news\/en\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roumazeilles.net\/news\/en\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}