James Daws, a student at the University of Alberta, runs his own home page 
(http://nyquist.ee.ualberta.ca/~dawe/chickenjoke.html). Recently he asked his 
readers that age-old question, why did the chicken cross the road? They 
slipped into various guises (except for Tom Clancy, who played himself) and 
responded:

Jane Austen: Because it is a truth universally
    acknowledged that a single chicken, being
    possessed of a good fortune and presented
    with a good road, must be desirous of 
    crossing.

Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your
    own chicken-nature.

Robert Burns:
         Fair Fa Your Honest Sonsie Face
       Great Chiefrain O' The Chicken Race
        The blackened road 'ahind ye said
         Ye best run quick ere ye be dead!

Tom Clancy: The Mark 84 gargleblaster that the
    chicken carried at the heart of which was
    an inferior ex-Soviet excimer laser system,
    had insufficient range to allow the chicken
    to carry out its mission from this side of
    the road.

Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the 
    cultural gestalt necessitiated that 
    individual chickens cross roads at this
    historical juncture, and therefore
    synchronicitously brought such occurrences
    into being.

Franz Kafka: Dieter, now in the form of a
    chicken, was running from the government's
    torture machine. The machine, an instrument
    of death, slowly obliterated the souls of 
    its victims. Dieter was alone. He was 
    running for his life, his insignificant life.

John Le Carre: Because it knew, at the core
    of its being where none could ever reach,
    that its only course of action now that
    its cover was blown wide open was to try and
    before Smiley came, accompanied by his silent
    shadow Peter Guillam, asking questions for
    which there could never be answers.

Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it
    with admiration, as a chicken which has
    the daring and courage to boldly cross the
    road, but also with fear, for whom among 
    them has the strength to contend with such
    a paragon of avian virtue? In such a
    manner is the princely chicken's dominion
    maintained.

Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.

Sir Isaac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to
    stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to
    cross the road.

B.F. Skinner: Because the external influence
    which had pervaded its sensorium from
    birth had caused it to develop in such
    a fashion that it would tend to cross
    road, even while believing these actions
    to be of its own free will.

Plato: For the greater good.

Hamlet: Because 'tis better to suffer in the
    mind the slings and arrows of outrageous
    road maintenance than to take arms against a
    sea of oncoming vehicles...

Doug Hofstadter: To seek explication of the
    correspondence between appearance and
    essence through the mapping of the
    external roadobject onto the internal
    roadconcept.

Hippocrates:  Because of an excess of light
   pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.

H.P. Lovecraft: To futilely attempt escape
   from the dark powers which even then pursued
   it, hungering after the stuff of its soul!

Jacques Derrida: Any number of contending
   discourses may be discovered within the
   act of the chicken crossing the road, and
   each interpretation is equally valid as
   the authorial intent can never be discerned,
   because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT,
   DEAD!

Thomas de Torquemada: Give me ten minutes with
   the chicken and I'll find out.

Robert Anton Wilson: Because agents of the
   Ancient Illuminate Roosters of Cooperia
   were controlling it with their Orbital Mind
   Control Lasers as part of their master plan
   to take over the world's egg production.

Timothy Leary: Because that's the only kind
   of trip the Establishment would let it take.

Douglas Adams: Fortytwo.

Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across
   the Road, the Road gazes also across you.

Aleister Crowley: Because it was its True Will
   to do so.

Oliver North:  National Security was at stake.

Sappho: For the touch of your skin, the sweetness
   of your lips.

J.R.R. Tolkein: The  chicken, sunlight coruscating
   off its radiant yellowwhite coat of feathers,
   approached the dark, sullen asphalt road and
   scrutinized it intently with its obsidianblack
   eyes.  Every detail of the thoroughfare leapt
   into blinding focus: the rough texture of the
   surface, over which countless inumerable
   fragments of stone embedded within the
   lugubrious mass, perhaps quarried from the
   great pits where the Sons of Man labored not
   far from gere; the dull black asphalt itself,
   exuding those waves of heat whoch distort the
   sight and bring weakness to the body; the
   other attributes of the great highway too
   numerous to give name.  And then crossed it.

Malcolm X: Because it would get across that road
   by any means necessary.

B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which
   had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused
   it to develop in such a fashion that is would
   tend to cross roads, even while believing these
   actions to be of its own free will.

Gary Gygax: Because I rolled a 64 on the "Chicken
   Random Behaviours" chart on page 497 of the
   Dungeon Master's Guide.

Trent Reznor: Because the world is FUCKED UP and
   it HATES ITSELF for being such a PITIFUL WHINY
   USELESS SHIT!

