When I asked one of my informants for a joke, he brought up the chicken crossing the road bit and asked if that was a joke.  I didn’t know how to respond.  When someone tells it properly, it is clearly not funny in a traditional sense.  However, it has become so recognized as an unfunny joke that I wonder about its place in society.  It is not a traditional joke; it is not a proverb; it is not a parable or a story used to teach children anything of use.  Instead, it is just kind of…there.  He had never thought about it that deeply until I began to probe a little bit more.  We both had no idea how to properly categorize it within pop culture.  Neither of us knew the origin of the chicken crossing the road, and we weren’t even sure if the original answer to the question was that he crossed the road “to get to the other side.”  Unsure of what to make of the famous chicken, I decided to include it with a question: why did someone ask in the first place why the chicken crossed the road?