Stapled to the chicken

Posted by Bob on December 26, 2005

In Reply to: Stapled to the chicken Posted by La on December 26, 2005

: I don't get this joke:
: Why did the dead baby cross the road? Because he was stapled to the chicken!"
: What does in this case 'to be stapled to the chicken mean'?
: Thank u.

It's not surprising you didn't get it. Some forms of humor don't travel well, don't translate at all, and most jokes never survive an autopsy. So, where do we begin. "Why did the chicken cross the road?" "To get to the other side" is a children's joke so old, so often repeated, and so familiar (in the US, anyway) that it has become a cliché, the archetype of all jokes. Many variations on the theme, and parodies of the them, have followed over the century or so it's been around. Then ... in the 1960s or 70s, a form of dark humor was briefly poplular: dead baby jokes. Your example is an amalgam of the two.