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unpunny · 6 years

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Why did the chicken cross the road?

Brilliant question. Let's find out why.

Historically, the chicken crossed the road to get to the other side.

Has anybody ever laughed at that joke? Why has it become so famous? And, for that matter, who cares? Why would you want to investigate why things are funny?

As E.B. White said: "analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog - few people are interested, and the frog dies."

But I want to dive into the guts of this chicken joke because today it is so famous, it is practically shorthand for comedy. And people frequently consider it either the worst joke of all time or the oldest joke.

But neither of those is true.

But first things first. The chicken joke isn’t technically even a joke. It’s an "anti-joke". It’s a joke about jokes. You see, we expect a joke to surprise us, to flip things around or use word play. But to get to the other side is just obvious, its mundane, which,by itself, can be pretty funny.

To make this more clear, let’s take a look at anti-joke chicken. "What's blue and smells like red paint? Blue paint."

You see, you expect a typical joke-y punchline, but instead what you get is hilariously serious.

Anti-Joke Cat is another good one.

"Knock knock." "Whos there?" "Lettuce." "Thats impossible."

"Yo mommas so fat, we are all extremely concerned for her health."

Anti-jokes can also be used for psychological experiments right at home. You may have heard of this one already, the "no soap, radio" joke.

Here's how it works. Get a couple of your friends together and tell them to all laugh when you're done telling the joke, no matter what. Then, go find target whos not in on it and tell them some version of a joke like this: "Two polar bears are sitting in a bathtub. The first one says "pass the soap." The second one says "no soap, radio." At this point, you and your friends should start laughing uproariously, meaning the target has one of two choices- either be afraid of looking dumb and laugh along anyway or say they’re confused, at which point you should tell them "what, you don't get it?" and keep laughing. You wait until the target gives into peer pressure and succumbs to mob mentality and joins, despite the fact that "no soap, radio" is actually nonsense.

As for being the oldest joke in the book, "why did the chicken cross the road?" is far from it. Its only about 160 some odd-years old. It first appeared in print in The Knickerbocker as a conundrum that really isn’t one - an anti-joke.

If you want to look for the oldest joke ever to appear in print, we’re going to have to go back 4,000 years to read some ancient Sumerian Proverbs. The joke is essentially a cautionary tale to never expect anything to be perfect. It goes like this: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband’s embrace."

So... yeah, the earliest known joke is a joke about a woman farting in a guys lap. So... cool!

All I’m sure of is that our proverbial chicken did not have Agyrophobia. That’s the fear of crossing streets.

But maybe the chicken should have.

I mean, crossing the road could be quite dangerous for a little bird, which leads us to a quite darker interpretation of the joke.

Maybe this chicken knew of the danger of crossing the road.

Maybe he knew what could happen.

Maybe he was sad or lonely or knew what his fate was.

And so he decided to take control and end it himself and crossed the road to get to the other side.

If you want to continue being morbid, check out DeathClock.com. Answer a few questions and the site will generate a countdown of the number of seconds you likely have left to live. You can just sit there and watch them tick away.

But let’s get back to the joke.

Perhaps a better question than "Why did the chicken cross the road?" is "Why wouldn’t chickens be crossing the road?" I mean, to be sure, the Earth is a big place and less than 1% of it is even paved, but there are quite a few chickens on Earth.

To put this in perspective, there are about 500 million cats and, as far as we go, there are 7 billion humans. But chickens? There are 24 billion chickens. We’re outnumbered more than 3:1. But if we cooked up every single chicken alive on Earth right now, we could fill enough KFC 16-piece buckets to form a stack of them going to the Moon and back three times. Unbelievable, right?

I mean, they all fit so nicely here on Earth’s surface, walking around with their characteristically lean meat, which, because fat contributes so much more flavor to a piece of meat than the muscle does, may explain why chicken is such a great generic meat flavor and why so many other exotic meats we try later tend to taste like chicken.

But let’s get back to the question in this video’s title.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Well, to get to the other side, sure, but there are many different motivations a chicken could have for going to the other side. Maybe it was looking for food, maybe it was being chased by a predator.

What matters though is that we can never know because there is no chicken.

It’s purely hypothetical, as opposed to the equally famous "Mary Had a Little Lamb," in which the lamb, and Mary, were real people. Mary Sawyer was an actual student at The Redstone School in Massachusetts and one day her brother encouraged her to bring her lamb to school. Her fellow students were amused, as was visiting student John Roulstone who wrote "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

We have actual documentation of those real people and events, but this chicken never even really existed.

So, asking why the chicken crossed the road is just like asking "Why did the original writer decide that it should be a chicken crossing a road?" Which means that the chicken crossed the road because some comedian in the 19th century decided that you would probably think about it too much, making the mundane "to get to the other side" answer quite surprising.

To explain this, let’s look at a computational neural explanation of humor. In order to effectively manage resources, our brains stay a few steps ahead of what we’re hearing, estimating what kind of outcomes are possible. But when we discover that were actually being told a joke, and none of our paths were the correct version of what was being told, all of that neural network energy needs to dissipate and according to some theorists, that energy moves into motor cortex, causing convulsions - laughter.

Unfortunately, our poor chicken friend doesn’t illicit that response from us anymore because we’ve all heard the joke. We know what to expect when the joke begins.

But we should be proud of our chicken friend and the unknown author who thought him up, because even though the joke is so famous it’s no longer funny, even at a neurological level, it still stands as a testament to just how complicated and clever our comedy can be.

Keep laughing.

And as always, thanks for watching.

#jokes #haha #joke #lol #lmao #funny #antijokes

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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Welcome to Vox’s weekly book link roundup, a curated selection of the internet’s best writing on books and related subjects. Here’s the best the web has to offer for the week of October 21, 2018.

I don’t mind, by the way, the appropriation of my curious condition for the purpose of metaphor, just as I don’t hold it against friends and colleagues when they ask if I need a hand (indeed I do), complain that they’re shorthanded (a little too on the nose), or claim they can perform some task with one hand tied behind their backs (not as well as I can). What bothers me is how thin the authors stretch it. Because while the book’s recipes are uncomplicated enough, many still require the kind of mundane prep—hunching over to cube raw chicken breasts for those skewers, grating zucchini and lemon zest for those salmon cakes—that, as a permanent resident of the particular state of being in question, I do occasionally resent.

For many writers, mapmaking is a practical endeavor that pulls them into their own work. “I always draw my way into stories,” writes Abi Elphinstone, the author of the Dreamsnatcher books. “I begin every story I write by drawing a map because it is only when my characters start moving from place to place that a plot unfolds.” Mitchell doesn’t print maps in his books, but he needs them to get through the writing. “If I’m describing a character’s ascent of a mountain, I need to know what he or she will find on the way up,” he writes. But also: Making maps is fun.

For its employees, the store has more often been an object of resentment. Patti Smith worked there briefly in the early 1970s, but told New York magazine she quit because it “wasn’t very friendly.” Mary Gaitskill worked there for a year and a half and described it, in a thinly veiled story from Bad Behavior, as, “a filthy, broken-down store” staffed by “unhappy homosexuals.” In 2005, an anonymous employee ran a (pretty dumb) blog called “I Hate the Strand” and the reviews on the store’s Glassdoor page are still largely negative. “Employees who were so miserable they joked about torching the building,” wrote one former employee. “Honestly, shut up with the tote bags,” wrote another. (About twenty percent of the Strand’s revenue comes from merch. They sell a lot of tote bags.)

“Let us have nothing so much in minde as death. At the stumbling of a horse, at the fall of a stone, at the least prick with a pinne, let us presently ruminate and say with our selves, what if it were death it selfe?” Montaigne advised that we must contemplate death at every turn and in doing so, we make ourselves ready for it in the most productive way possible. On a more personal note, I managed to achieve this by spending four years writing a Ph.D. thesis on Montaigne’s work, a task which forced me to contemplate death every single day.

Fictional gender benders may be as old as Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” But recent years have seen a boomlet in transgender literature. In a field previously dominated by memoir and genre fiction (sci-fi, young adult), a number of first novels with more purely literary designs — including playing with genre — are getting attention. “It’s really exciting to see an emerging crop of trans-related fiction by trans people,” said Meredith Talusan, a journalist who writes about L.G.B.T.Q. issues. “It takes a lot of mettle to tread narrative terrain without a real tradition and without a lot of cultural support.”

Lately I’ve been thinking about a corpus of texts that centers on trans writing. I’m apprehensive about the limitations inherent in canonization, mainly canon’s inadequate literary representation of difference as tokenism, and the prohibitive inaccessibility for those who can’t afford education at the highest levels. So it’s not a canon exactly, but a corpus. It’s something more like a body: mutable, evolving, flexible, open, exposed, exposing. It’s the opposite of erasure; it’s an inscription.

As of this fall, Dorothy has 18 books, each compact, beautiful, and surprising — every one of them spectacular. Riker says, “Our plan initially was to lose money. We set it up as two books a year so we could lose a thousand dollars a year and be able to absorb it. We wanted to do as well as we could with the books, but to never ever have to worry about how they sold because no matter how they did, we could keep going.” They didn’t lose money. Within three years, they were able to recoup the $5,000 they had saved up to start the project. Now, because the press is volunteer-run, all proceeds go to the authors or back into the press.

Meanwhile, here’s a rundown of the week in books at Vox:

As always, you can keep up with Vox’s book coverage by visiting vox.com/books. Happy reading!

Original Source -> How Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’s iconic cover came together

via The Conservative Brief

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victoriagloverstuff · 6 years

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Like Most Americans, I Was Raised to Be A White Man

Like most Americans, I was raised to be a white man: I read William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. I read F. Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Bukowski. I came to identify with the emotionally disengaged characters, the staccato sentences, the irreverent dirty old man voice. The books I read asked me to imagine the power I might have. I got women pregnant and then worried that they wouldn’t get an abortion, tying me down forever when all I wanted to do was continue experiencing my freedom. I wrote poems about the absurdity of writing poems, enjoying the decadence of imagining my readers drinking in my disregard for them. Being likeable, explaining oneself to others, were not prerequisites of protagonism. I watched women move—their hips in dresses, their lips on glasses, their breasts heaving. All of it offered up to me, to enjoy, to consume. The fact that I was a brown woman was not something that seemed immediately relevant when I was younger.

I moved through the world with this sense that I would have access to the same kind of power as the protagonists of the books I read and movies I watched. Of course we all identify with white protagonists—they’re almost always the heroes, the ones with the power to change things, to affect things rather than simply be affected.

As James Baldwin put it,

You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish.

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And whether it be because you are female, brown, queer, or in any other way visibly other from white, able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual men, it feels like a kind of violence when you suddenly have to reckon with the differences of the body you’re in. Not because of some innate qualities embedded in those differences, but because of all the assumptions made about the body you’re in that you have to confront.

Coming of age in particular constitutes a jarring emergence of double-consciousness—of being forced to see yourself through the eyes of others even as you’re still trying to form a sense of self.

During a summer trip to Florida to visit relatives, my aunt, poolside, remarked upon my 14-year-old form in a bathing suit: When did you get breasts? How big are those things? I felt ashamed—and not just because my body was suddenly a spectacle. I already knew it was. How big are those things was precisely how I felt about the strange lumps of flesh that had sprouted from my body. They were separate from me.

While I was deeply embarrassed by my aunt’s commentary, there was an element of identification, of relating to her perspective. It seemed more of a farce to me that people could look at me and assume that this newly hatched female form was somehow me instead of something that had happened to me.

And yet, that is the presumption: that the general shape you come to take imbues you with certain “female” traits—to be accommodating, empathetic, emotional, sexual (but not too sexual!). Our bodies become shorthand for a grab-bag of assumptions, some of which we grow into, some of which we bristle against.

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My femaleness has always been something that seemed to fit me poorly—at turns an oversized garment I could not fill, or some skimpy rag out of which I spilled.

I’ve already made a mistake by calling the femaleness “mine.” It’s never felt like a thing I owned so much as a general shape I grew into that seemed to offer me up for public consumption.

“I moved through the world with this sense that I would have access to the same kind of power as the protagonists of the books I read and movies I watched.“

The phrase “gender is a construct” might strike some as academic claptrap, but ask any woman how they were treated before and after puberty, and you’re well on your way to understanding not just the truth, but how fucked up that truth is—the extent to which the entire world, and the way you must navigate it, is irrevocably changed.

Also at 14, I remember walking down the street with K. and H., my closest friends, in the North Carolina college town where I grew up. We flinched when three men started catcalling us. Yeah, baby. Look at that ass. I remember feeling bewildered and disarmed. Having a reputation as being the outspoken one, I felt vaguely responsible for doing something about it. But I did nothing.

One of the most humiliating aspects of that moment was that in doing nothing, it felt like I had allowed them to do something to us. This is one of the most nefarious aspects of predatory behavior: it makes the target of the behavior feel complicit. You might be going about your business, and then someone who has more power than you demands engagement—the kind in which even your refusal does not always free you, forcing you to play a part in a scene you had no interest in even auditioning for.

A couple hours after the encounter with those men, my friends and I piled back into the car and started our drive home. That’s when I spotted the men, still roving the sidewalk not far from where we’d encountered them. Wait! I told H., who was driving. Slow down. I rolled down the window, started shouting at them the very same things they had lobbed at us: Yeah, baby. Look at that ass. It was a humbling and educational moment because, of course, they loved it. I was startled in my naïveté: I had turned the tables, but the tables had not turned.

I didn’t have the language for it then, but this was one of the first times I experienced how my words would always be shaped by my appearance—how they would be heard differently. How they would often weigh less. How the expectations of my femaleness would become a thing I would repeatedly have to explain, justify, respond to, contradict.

The same was true of my brownness. Growing up in the South, I quickly learned how to translate the questions “What are you?” and “Where are you from?” Obviously, “human” and “North Carolina by way of Connecticut and California” didn’t cut it. What they wanted was for me to explain the parts of me that weren’t white. I came to accept the question, and as I got older, played around with responses. Sometimes I’d say I was “half white” (and in response to “What’s the other half?” I’d add “half non-white”). Sometimes I’d say I was “mostly human.” I played dumb, and answered as literally as possible in an attempt to force people to examine what they were saying, what they actually wanted to know, and whether it was a reasonable thing to ask of a virtual stranger.

This was hardly unique to my experience of growing up in the South. When I was in my twenties, I spoke to a literary agent in New York about a collection of short stories I had written. She was excited by my writing, but concerned that there wasn’t enough of an “overarching emotional arc or theme” to connect the stories. “For instance,” she wrote,

Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories have something larger to say about first generation Indian-Americans—about marriage, family dynamics, adjusting to a new country, etc., and I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to say here . . . I’d like to see more of your background woven into the stories.

Better yet, one of the stories in the collection I had shared with her included a protagonist who was an Indian writer in conversation with her agent:

“Nobody biting yet,” the agent writes, suggesting that I start something new—something that “takes advantage of your heritage. . . . How about a novel with an Indian-in-America theme? Sort of Jhumpa Lahiri-ish?”

It was darkly comical that the real-life agent was echoing the fictional situation I had written. At the time, I took her feedback to heart. Yet I found myself wondering about what she meant by my “background.” My primary identity is not as a first-generation Indian-American. I identify more as an ambiguously brown American—one who decided to learn Spanish in part because so many people assume I’m Latina, that I figured I should be able to at least say, “No soy Latina. Mi padre es de India y mi madre es blanca—de Estados Unidos.” The unifying theme in the stories I gave the agent was precisely this: my characters were shape-shifters whose appearances were often in tension with their self-identification.

I abandoned those stories, and it wasn’t until almost a decade after my conversation with that agent that I thought: Would she ever have said “I’d like to see more of your background woven into the stories” to a white male writer?

“I didn’t have the language for it then, but this was one of the first times I experienced how my words would always be shaped by my appearance—how they would be heard differently.”

When you ask what terrain a white male fiction writer might explore, the sky is generally the limit. (In fact, it’s rare to even see that question posed.) But if you’re queer, brown, female, differently abled, etc., it’s expected that you’ll discuss that. More than discuss it, you’re often tasked with explaining it—what happened, why you look the way you do, why you identify the way you do in contrast to the expectations projected on you based on your appearance. The conversation you’re supposed to have is the conversation white folks would like to have based on what they see. They’re the kinds of questions we almost never think to ask white folks themselves—particularly white men.

As an “other,” the complex human you are ends up being reduced to a handful of visible traits. It’s a kind of censorship: the world’s questions shape how you define yourself, how you explain yourself. Even individuals and organizations with good intentions end up reinforcing this heavily policed line: there are a number of scholarship and funding initiatives for marginalized individuals, but to be eligible or to have a real chance of being selected, you usually have to prove that this identity is core to who you are and the work you do.

To move beyond the perceived notions of your identity can be destabilizing for other people. As a teenager, I recall a drunken frat boy who, after seeing me teaching a friend basic dance steps, ambled over to ask what kind of dancing we were doing. I told him it was salsa. His brow furrowed. Then he asked, “What are you?” I translated his question, replied that I was half Indian. I watched his face travel a journey of utter bewilderment. There were about eight long seconds of silence before he came out with: “Then . . . shouldn’t you be Indian dancing?” Despite the offensiveness of the question, I laugh when I think about it. In the moment, I recall telling him that I knew he had had a lot to drink, but that I wanted him to try to remember the conversation when he woke up the next morning, and to think about what he’d assumed and why it was problematic. He nodded, a little confused, the effort of earnestly trying to follow my instructions written on his face.

I sometimes get nostalgic about the transparent way that boy responded to me. I knew exactly where he stood. He felt like less of a threat than so many of the folks who count themselves as allies while their bigotry goes unexamined, closeted behind a veneer of progressive cred or good intentions. This outright confusion or even straightforward bigotry and sexism can be easier to navigate than the more veiled way so many Americans—particularly those on the Left—deal with their confusion about, and fear of, otherness.

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Good read found on the Lithub

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