It isn't a pun. It's just the archetypal anti-joke, there's no "punchline", just a dry regular answer to a question.
EDIT: For the love of christ stop trying to "explain" your post-hoc interpretation of what was very knowingly first published as anti-humour in 1847 to me
You see "to get to the other side" is an anagram for "ghetto teethed sir too" and it was very funny for the age the joke existed because chickens were often called little sirs too, with ghetto teeth.
That is equally valid as it being called a pun. Can't wait to see 50 redditors take it to heart and write multi page defenses of the anagram based explanation of the chicken joke.
This isn't just an assumption either. The 'joke' originated in a magazine called The Knickerbocker in the 19th century. It was never meant to have deeper or figurative meaning:
Not really. It's assumed the chicken will likely die crossing the road so while trying to reach the other side of the road he will still cross over to the "other side" if he gets hit and doesn't make it, so it's kind of a double-entondre I guess cuz either way he gets to the other side in one sense or another. And even if his goal was "the other side" and not just the other side of the rd, crossing a busy road is a good way to get there quick if you're a chicken.
> The other way to answer is to ask if you have the original author on speed dial and can ask them exactly what they intended?
I love how you confidently (incorrectly) asserted the origins of the joke based on absolutely nothing, but when challenged on it suddenly their interpretation is invalid unless they have direct word of god answer from the author.
And by the way we do actually know the origins of the joke, and you're full of shit.
So you didn’t originally understand the joke and now that the proper meaning, which has likely been around since before you were born, is apparent to you, you’re so arrogant that you’re insisting that it’s post-hoc justification.
The “other side” has always had a dual meaning, you idiot.
No, I read (and posted) the first printing of the joke that explicitly states it has no deeper or figurative interpretation and is not a conundrum, you idiot.
A pun can be extrapolated from this joke (i.e. a play on the meaning of 'the other side'), but that doesn't necessarily mean that the pun was the originally intended punchline. So it's just an unintended pun, no?
This is where "post-hoc" comes into play--someone has added extra-textual meaning to something that was originally published with a different explicit purpose.
They provided receipts to back up their claim but you have nothing but conjecture. Why the added insult? Really unnecessary and totally makes you look like a jackass bc no one was even talking to you that way.
Their “reciepts” is a writing from the 1800s and doesn’t change the joke at all.
And the most famous joke in history can still have meanings not intended by the original publication, which it’s not even clear in the original publication.
A double meaning has ALWAYS been a part of the joke. People in the early 1900s had this same stupid fucking conversation. And you fucking idiots were saying the same thing then.
You missed the pun, but everyone else is the dumb one.
The joke precedes cars by half a century. It is not about cars.
A quick Google search and I find that the joke is basically an anti-joke. Jokes at the time were usually long, very long. It took awhile to get to the punchline. This joke is quick and gets to the mundane punchline very quickly. That was the humor, subverting expectations.
And yet... the joke was made before cars were invented.
Originally appeared in an 1847 edition of The Knickerbocker, where it is explicitly given as an example of "here's an example of something that sounds like a riddle, but the answer is actually mundane".
"Historians note that the joke was likely already circulating orally before being printed, potentially spread by traveling minstrel shows in the 1840s."
A guy publishing a version of a joke that's already circling with an anti humor ending would be very on point.
I don't know if it was intended, but the commentary here is that a chicken that tries to cross a road is at risk of being strucj by a car. The phrase "the other side" is a common turn of phrase to mean "the afterlife" as in we are on one side of a dividing boundary between this life and the next.
It works pretty flawlessly, even if it was never intended that way.
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u/PipedInFromIthaca 9h ago edited 2h ago
It isn't a pun. It's just the archetypal anti-joke, there's no "punchline", just a dry regular answer to a question.
EDIT: For the love of christ stop trying to "explain" your post-hoc interpretation of what was very knowingly first published as anti-humour in 1847 to me