WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?
(A sampling of responses from the 14 million-plus pages of answers a Google search will identify, plus some of our own devising.)

President Barack Obama: Let me be clear: It was reaching out to the other side.

Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ): Check his papers!

Dick Cheney: Where’s my gun?

Noam Chomsky:  The chicken didn't exactly cross the road. As of 1994, something like 99.8% of all US chickens reaching maturity that year, had spent 82% of their lives in confinement. The living conditions in most chicken coops break every international law ever written, and some, particularly the ones for chickens bound for slaughter, border on inhumane. My point is, they had no chance to cross the road (unless you count the ride to the supermarket). Even if one or two have crossed roads for whatever reason, most never get a chance. Of course, this is not what we are told. Instead, we see chickens happily dancing around on Sesame Street and Foster Farms commercials where chickens are not only crossing roads, but driving trucks (incidentally, Foster Farms is owned by the same people who own the Foster Freeze chain, a subsidiary of the dairy industry). Anyway, ... (Chomsky continues for 32 pages. For the full text of his answer, contact Odonian Press)

Rush Limbaugh: Because the Obama regime had turned the coop into a socialist concentration camp. And he's coming for us next.

Bill Clinton:  That depends on how yuh define "road."

Hamlet: That is not the question.

Plato: For the greater good.

Aristotle: To actualize its potential.

Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.

Kafka: Hardly the most urgent enquiry to make of a low-grade  insurance clerk who woke up that morning as a hen.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

Salvador Dali: The Fish.

Charles Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

Epicurus: For fun.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.

Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?

The Sphinx: You tell me.

Henry David Thoreau:  To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of life.

Chaucer: So priketh hem nature in hir corages.

Wordsworth: To wander lonely as a cloud.

John Keats: Philosophy will clip a chicken's wings.

William Blake: To see heaven in a wild fowl.

Othello: Jealousy.

Oscar Wilde: Why, indeed? One's social engagements whilst in town ought never expose one to such barbarous inconvenience—although, perhaps, if one must cross a  road, one may do far worse than to cross it as the chicken in question.

Swift: It is, of course, inevitable that such a loathsome, filth-ridden and degraded creature as Man should assume to question the actions of one in all respects his superior.

Macbeth: To have turned back were as tedious as to go o'er.

Freud: An die andere Seite zu kommen. (Much laughter)

John Donne: Send not to ask why the chicken crossed the road. It crosseth for thee.

Did the chicken cross the road
Did he cross it with a toad?
Yes the chicken crossed the road,
But whey he crossed I’ve not been told.