Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Why did the chicken cross the road

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

Alex Schmidt, Katie Goldin, and special guest Joey Clift explore why "why did the chicken cross the road" is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Why did the chicken cross the road? Known for and famous for getting to the other side. Nobody thinks much about that joke. So let's have some fun. Let's find out why, why podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie, hi. Hello. Yeah, hi. Hello. And we are joined by a thrilling, wonderful guest. He's been on the show before, and he's a comedian. He's also a TV writer for shows like Spirit Rangers on Netflix. And among many things, we're going to link gone native.tv where he has assembled

amazing comedy shorts and more. welcome back joey clift joey hey yeah hey everybody thanks so much for having me you know i've been on secretly incredibly fascinating a couple times and um something i've realized is if it's supposed to be a secret why is this podcast like publicly available are we are we ruining the secret so you change the name publicly. Incredibly fascinating. What if I tried to keep it secret every week and there's just a devious hacker, right? They just keep putting it out. I'm here in my bunker. You got to know somebody's posting these conversations online, Alex. This isn't a

secret anymore. It's a secret with our closest X thousand friends. Yeah, actually, in the canon of it, Katie is probably the hero hacker, right? Like, I try to keep our conversation secret, and then Katie's putting it out for the people, like Robin Hood. Let me do some quick hacks right now. Hack, hack, hack, hack. 1-0, 1-0, 1-0, 1-0. I just hacked the system. I hacked the database.

I'm in. I'm in. I was about to say, we're in. I love it. And we have a question selected by many listeners. Hey, Kayla suggested this. A lot of support from Weig and the polls as well. We always start by asking what our relationship to the topic is or opinion of it. And Joey, why don't you go first? What's your relationship to the joke? Why did the chicken cross the road? I would say that I respect it as a monolith of comedic achievement in that it's a joke that kind of everybody can quote, right? Like, I feel like it would be, you know, and, you know, as somebody who's like, you know, I feel like it would be, you know, and, you know, as somebody who's like, you know, comedy writer professionally, as you know, everybody on this episode is. I would not say it's something that I laugh at, but it's something that I respect as a building block for everything that came before it. the that like that show should thank how the chicken crossed the road for us getting uh tim robinson screaming uh 99 tacos 99 uh burritos 99 hamburgers etc like like joke evolution wise it's uh yeah like yeah this is it's that's the it's like that's the primordial ooze that we've crawled out of. I like it. We all stand on the shoulders of chickens. I love that.

Yeah. And Katie, what about you? How do you feel about this joke? Well, you know, it is a joke and it involves chickens. So I do like chickens and I like jokes. So you would think this would be a favorite joke of mine. But you know, I feel like it is too repeated. It's like when you repeat a word over and over again, it no longer means anything, right? I think we kind of covered that on our

on our deja vu episode. Yeah, where it's like the kind of opposite of deja vu where it's like happens so much and you recall it so much it's like loses all meaning at a certain point and that's how i feel about this joke there's no way i can appreciate it in any objective way because I've been, we've all been overdosed with the chicken joke. And I'm saying, yeah, this, this joke is officially comedy and yet not comedy in my head. Like it's just, it's a thing that is in the file cabinet of comedy and is not funny. It's so interesting to me about comedy is like comedy is ultimately like what a laugh is, is it's like a biological response on your body reacting to a surprise, but with no danger present. So that's why like so many jokes are like surprising in some way. And when you have

a joke like this, that's just so in the zeitgeist, the set up and punchline of the joke isn't surprising. So you acknowledge that it's a joke it has the structure of a joke and probably when this was first told i'm sure it just like killed at the the the king's castle it was set at by the court jester or whatever but now it's like you kind of have the joke has to be like built or twisted in uh in such a way for it to like even you know feel funny. And that's something that you see, I think, with the memification of things like Garfield,

where it's just like Garfield is something that we understand that Garfield is funny, but because we all understand Garfield hates Mondays, loves lasagna, you kind of have to do a little bit more to it to have it track as a joke. So Garfield is like a horror villain or something like that the joke itself stops being surprising so you have to add stuff to it for it to be surprising again i feel like that's happened though with the dark garfield now sort of the horror version of the horror version of garfield has been done so much that now we've got to bring it back around and have boring quotidian Garfield for it to be funny again. We almost need just the strip now. We almost need just the strip now for it to be funny anymore.

Wait, let's do a quick writer's room. Okay, so how can we punch up How Did the Chicken Cross the Road? Oh. Okay. The chicken is mad at Odie. Nope, I'm in Garfield mode. Shoot. That's.

Can we label the chicken as a political party we don't like and the road as taxes? I don't care how the chicken crossed the road. I want to know where he's going. And the answer is to storm the Capitol. There we go. Make it topical. Topical as of a couple of years ago. And perhaps the year to come. The humor increases with the number of labels that we put in the comic.

Yeah. Because for one thing, researching this, Googling the joke is somewhat difficult because there are a lot of sort of random blog posts where people have done this joke, but with famous scientists or this joke, but with politics and they just made up versions. Yeah, it's like, why did Einstein cross the road? And it's like, because energy equals mass equals whatever, you know, yeah. Right. But Salvador Dali melted a clock on the road you know it's just stupid yeah i have this urge to give someone a wedgie now me too i like how uh i like how mad alex was it just the idea of Salvador Dali. You were just like, it's stupid. Yeah. Salvador Dali jokes. Clocks don't melt like that. So passe.

You know what doesn't persist? Salvador Dali joke funniness. Oh, roasted him. Boom. Got him. Got him. Got him. This topic. We're going to get into like cultural trends, historical trends, bird science.

This was really wonderful to research. The fascinating set of numbers and statistics about the topic. This week, that is in a segment called, But if I count stats with you all, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do, things just couldn't count the same. you all do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do By Willow Tanager. Thank you, Willow. No, keep going. The song's like 12 minutes long. Do the guitar solo. Yeah. Yeah.

Facts, facts, facts, facts. Yeah. I've played Guitar Hero. I know how to play that song. Sorry, Alex, you were mentioning who wrote that. Thank you, Willow Tanager. We have a new name for this every week. Please make a Missillion Wacky and Bad as possible.

Submit through Discord or to sifpod at gmail.com. The first thing is instances of a chicken crossing a road. Okay, I'm sure it's happened. It turns out the first number is 2015. That's the year when a chicken tried to cross the road at the San Francisco Bay Bridge Toll Plaza. I feel like that's the only chicken that we've caught doing it. It turns out it's not, but also there are a lot more stories of it thanks to social media.

That's a weird thing about this phenomenon is that newspapers, TV, books, I guess, they didn't really record this. They have limited bandwidth and page space, and they're kind of serious. And ever since social media got going, there's a lot of these stories of people being like, oh, like the joke and taking a picture with their phone. That feels like the human response to that joke is if you see a chicken actually crossing a road, you have to take a picture of it and then post something on social media that's like, he did it or got him or like something. Is social media ruining our chickens? Are the chickens crossing the road just to get famous on TikTok? Are chickens engaging in a dangerous new TikTok trend crossing the road just for likes. Yeah. And this chicken, it got on social media

first. Around 5.50 AM, there were traffic alerts due to a social media post about a chicken running around the fast track lanes of the San Francisco Bay Bridge toll plaza. And then a couple more Twitter users got pictures of it just standing in lane lines. And from there, this got passed on to multiple California state agencies. There was Caltrans, which is the Department of Transportation for the state. They said they couldn't put a crew member in harm's way to collect the chicken. And Atlas Obscura says they did. So they just let it get obliterated by a truck?

And Atlas Obscurus says they've guessed. So they just let it get obliterated by a truck? That was probably their fallback idea. But their next idea was to pass it on to law enforcement, the California Highway Patrol. Chips. Chips, yeah. Yeah, like the show Chips. chips. And the chips deployed officers in neon yellow high visibility jackets to pursue the bird on foot and capture it after a chase across multiple road lanes. Then the officers took a photo with the quote felonious fowl before putting it in a patrol car and bringing it to a veterinarian.

Did they do like a high speed chicken chase that resulted in a bunch of like city infrastructure damage and hit pedestrians? Because, you know, I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah. Apprehending this chicken probably cost the state of California $12 million. That's where our schools went. Yay. We don't need more teachers. We do need cops chasing chickens.

Yeah. But was this chicken breaking any laws? Basically not breaking laws because there aren't laws about it. It was more of a let's prevent, like a truck would just barrel through it, but a car might swerve or cause an accident or something. Right. Yeah, truck drivers are merciless. Yeah, that's my point. Yeah, yeah. Truck drivers are merciless. Yeah, that's my point.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, if a truck driver tried to swerve to avoid a chicken, it would probably kill like 20 people. So that's probably the right call. Yeah. It's like the trolley problem or something. It's weird. Yeah.

That's what I was going to say. It's like, it's like a trolley problem of like, okay, do I save this one chicken or 20 humans? I eat chicken. So I feel like that trolley problem is pretty easy. You're going to say this one chicken or 20 humans? I eat chicken. So I feel like that trolley problem is pretty easy. And if it's not, there's something wrong with me. Like, how can I eat chicken but be like, I will sacrifice 20 people to not run over this chicken? That's true.

I also eat chicken. So any issue that happened here, it's not that different from how I operate in the world. I, over the past year, have gotten really into like personal training and like strength conditioning and stuff like that. And my personal trainer, he has me follow like macros. So I have to eat a certain amount of like protein and stuff like that every day. So I've become like such an eater of chicken in a way that I'm embarrassed by like like i was traveling the number one cause of death for all chickens i think i might be like i was i was uh like i was in an airport yesterday and i was panicking because i was trying to find an airport kiosk that sold like

pre-cooked chicken i could eat just on the plane cold. I have a problem. So I guess what I'm saying is if that chicken, regardless of whether that chicken got hit by a truck or not, I probably would have eaten it. This sounds more like a chicken addiction than like, like, I don't know, man. Look, I'm OK with you eating chicken. But like, do you have like a chicken fix? You know what I mean? Like, I mean mean i do start shaking when i don't right chicken yes you start sweating you get nervous right yeah i mean this is

this is uh this is we're only recording the audio of our private zoom chat but i am eating a full rotisserie chicken while we're talking just with my bare hands we vetted it out these sort of like squelching sounds yeah the squelching sounds and just the very quiet, like me going like, oh yeah, this is stuff. The yummies. There's a lot of yummies happening. Yummy chicken. Yeah. I have a big studio magic dial for that kind of stuff.

It's labeled yummy. I turn it away. You have a yummy dial. So this chicken, so the chicken was retrieved without incident, apprehended. What happened to it after this? Do we know? Did like the, did the chip, did the California Highway Patrol have like a mysterious barbecue the next day? With these stories, they tend to only report who the police gave the chicken to.

So we don't know what the veterinarian did. And chickens don't have a huge lifespan either. So it's 2015, the chicken's probably not around. Might as well eat it, right? Yeah, I mean, it was the veterinarian. It was me and a mustache and a hastily made veterinarian coat, yes. You turn your back and look back around and he's got just feathers around his mouth.

Yeah, I just swallowed it whole. Joey's like, it's the only way to get a chicken. And people are like, no, there's a lot of ways. I just hang out by roads in California and I wait for a chicken to cross. So chickens cross roads routinely or is this a rare occurrence? I found multiple stories and we're going to highlight three, including that one. But they're all social media era. The next one is 2016.

2016 is when a Scottish police department made a Facebook post about apprehending a chicken crossing a road. And this is Cara Giaimo, wonderful writer writing for Atlas Obscura. Yes. She said, Tayside police asked the community for, as a joke, information on why the chicken crossed the road in the East Market Gate area of Dundee, Scotland. And they say they delivered the chicken to the SSPCA, the Scottish Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

That sounds like a cover for chicken jail. cruelty to animals. So that sounds like a cover for chicken jail. I imagine being the social media manager for like a police station is probably a really like not fun job. But do you think that if a chicken crosses a road in a town, that town social media manager for that police department, it's like the best day of their life? Because they're like, oh, I get to like slam dunk a joke. Like, oh my gosh, work was good today. Like running home. Like, can you believe it? Yeah, totally.

Yeah. Yeah. Or they just, they just lean back in their chair and they do that swish, like layoff noise. When this is the most extraordinary one to me. The year is 2022. An animal welfare group in Arlington, Virginia, used Twitter to post about a chicken crossing roads and at least one security perimeter at the Pentagon. Wow. Interesting. Wow. Was this chicken investigated for ties to foreign governments?

Was this chicken investigated for ties to foreign governments? The Pentagon spokesperson went up this high. They said that the chicken was, quote, nervous. They also called it sweet and said the chicken calmed down enough to allow at least one person to pet her. Ah, that's nice. This is called a good cop, bad cop. The good cop pets the chicken, offers it corn. The bad cop shows it an empty KFC bucket. And this is how we figure out where the chicken has hidden the bomb. Oh, yeah. I mean, the chicken was

strapped with explosives for sure. I mean, this chicken is clearly an infiltrator, a spy. It's just fun to have a chicken try to enter the Pentagon by crossing a road because it's the joke and also what spy mission is the chicken on? Yeah, I thought that the CIA tried a surveillance thing with pigeons back in the day. So who's to say a chicken couldn't be deployed in some kind of like did they examine the chicken for mechanical parts or electronics? Them petting the chicken does feel irresponsible. Right. Chicken could have been covered in anthrax. Yeah.

Yeah, and this got posted by the Animal Welfare League of Arlington, hashtag Pentagon Chicken. And then that worked its way up to the news organization, The Guardian, who then talked to a Department of Defense spokesman who was willing to confirm that a female Rhode Island red chicken crossed a road and went into the first layer of Pentagon security. However, quote, we are not allowed to disclose exactly where she was found. We can only say it was at a security checkpoint. Hmm.

Chicken just walks up to the booth. It's like, this looks all in order to me. Oh, with a badge? Yeah. Yeah. Bawk. Ah, Mrs. Bawk. Yes, of course. You're here for your 10 o'clock. Bawk, bawk. Bawk, bawk.

I like that they're being secretive about what room the chicken was found in when it was probably just like the lobby. Yeah, it seems like it was still outside like it was just one of those gates way out at the front yeah yeah it wasn't found in like you know like a roswell ufo or something it was like no it wasn't like in a garden or something yeah this like thanks to the guardian and others it becomes national if not global news uh jimmy fallon did a parody song about it that night on late night tv. And we know the chicken got adopted by a staff member of the animal welfare group who has a small family farm in Virginia. I think we always love a story about an animal breaking the rules, like when that possum

went on the football field recently. We just love animals being where they're not supposed to be. And do you think that is because we deep down sort of are straining against the rules and regulations of our society and wish to be unrestrained like a chicken? It's true. It's sort of like a lot of humor to some people. I think it's like, oh, I can break the bonds of norms in society. Right. And so it's fun in real life when a chicken's just like oh, I can break the bonds of norms and society. Right. And so it's fun in real life when a chicken's just like balking around in the Pentagon. Great.

I can't go in there. There are rules. But the chicken- A real triumph. Yeah, but the chicken don't care. Yeah. And more with this joke. The next number is another year, but it's 1847. Back in 1847.

That is the year when a humor magazine called the Knickerbocker published the oldest recorded version of the Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road joke. We think that's the earliest publication or recording of Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road. Okay, you've got to tell us, what was the exact writing on that joke? Was there racism, Alex? Please don't tell me there was. Yeah, I was about to say, yeah, yeah. Scared. I'm worried. Filled with slurs. As soon as you said 18 something, I was like, it's going to be racist.

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, perfect question. Cause no racial or weird component to this joke, but 1847. So, so cancel culture got to it is what you're saying. The wokes in 1847. Wow. So it was too woke. There's a 200 year old listener. Like, yeah, I read the Knickerbocker all the time and then it got canceled.

Now I can't anymore. Oh, geez. Yeah. I guess you can't say any jokes anymore but yeah what was the what was the what was the original incantation of the joke to me it's very 1847 because it's too long and wordy right like comedy's tighter now so here's a chicken a member of the family gallus gallus, commonly a domesticated farm animal, was found crossing a road when used by automobiles. Great, great pull of the chicken scientific name, Gallus gallus.

That's great. And it's essentially that. Here's the text. Quote, there are quips and quillets which seem actual conundrums, but yet are none. Right? It's a terrible setup. Continue. Of such is this.

Why does a chicken cross the street? Are you out of town? Do you give it up? Well, then, because it wants to get on the other side. Well, we did have a lot of lead in our paint back then. Yeah. Like, it's pretty much exactly the joke and then just with a lot of framing and

puffing around about, here comes a joke. Pretty wild. Yeah. Steady yourself, find a chair and get comfortable, for I am about to regale you with a bit of a witticism. Yeah. Do you think that, like like they workshopped that? Like was that the first draft of the joke

or do they have like a writer's room for it to punch it up? Like what's the longer version of that? They had the gaudiest of writer's room to come up with that. The gaudiest of writer's room? The most gaudy of writer's rooms to come up with that one where the pipe smoke was thick as a pea soup and they're all like why do we all have gout and consuming nothing but mutton and bourbon

like i don't get it yeah yeah i feel like the reaction reading that in the 1840s was probably just one hearty huh yeah yeah and then back to a bit of a twitch air air flowing quickly over the mustache yeah to signify amusement yeah uh i feel like now i want to i want to see stand-ups do that a little bit more of like really cue up that a joke is coming just like like exactly what uh katie said i'm just like hey everybody are you ready to laugh here comes something real funny steady yourselves okay here we go how did the chicken cross the road oh well here comes the punch line to get the other side oh like everybody enjoy their yourselves yeah i do like at comedy shows get confused when a joke happens because I don't understand. I just think that they're talking to me about stuff that really happens.

And so when they say something that doesn't really fit with reality and then other people start making weird noises around me, it's really scary. Yeah, that's that is actually a really interesting thing about. I mean, it's really scary. Yeah. That is actually a really interesting thing about, so I write a lot of different stuff, but I've written for a couple of like preschool shows lately for just kind of like younger audiences. And a lot of people ask me like, what's the difference between writing for like, you know, adults or writing for like young kids?

And like, it really is. It's exactly that for young kids of just like really having to like shine a light on just like, hey, is everybody ready something funny is gonna happen like is every okay everybody the funny thing's gonna happen oh the funny thing happened hey everybody wasn't that funny oh that was so great right it's like a page it's like not just like a two-liner set up punchline it's like a page of like ramping up for the joke then the then the punchline then all the characters laugh of like ramping up for the joke then the then the punchline then all the characters laugh for like 30 seconds and then the characters reflect on the laugh for like

30 seconds so basically uh everybody in the 1800s sense of humor was preschoolers that of preschoolers yeah yeah like even there's no way to quantify, but I've heard a theory that people just consumed far fewer jokes before we had more mass media. Like day to day, you just heard a lot less jokes because you didn't have TV, radio, even newspapers, like broadcasting jokes to you all the time. I don't know. I'm so skeptical of that, though. Like people must have just like talked to each other and had a sense of humor with each other. Maybe like they weren't used to the kind of like certain joke formats, like knock knock jokes or like certain specific formats for jokes. But there had to be like a lot of humor. That's true. What else do you do if you don't have humor and you're like, you know, trying to winnow some grain like life would suck? You know, we're all like millennials who grew up loving comedy.

So it's like we kind of like we like our like language to each other is comedy and jokes and bits. And it's like Simpsons quotes. Yeah. Simpsons quotes, you knowons quotes you know garfield things like that and it's like it would be i just can't imagine like walking through the world and being like i heard my one joke for the month and they explained to me that it was a joke before they gave it and then i laughed once and like the earliest i thought like one of the earliest jokes was kind of animal related. And what is it?

It's that ancient Sumerian joke. Let me actually say the joke so people... Punchline is either garbled or doesn't make sense. A dog walked into a tavern and said, I can't see a thing. I'll open this one. And so the idea is that... Already on board. open this one. And so the idea is that either the translation isn't quite right, or that there was some context, right? Like maybe there was a previous joke that this joke is

building on like a meta joke, or some common understanding of something or like a pun, like a kind of an idiom. To me, this is evidence that we've always had like animal jokes where like, you know, animal does something expected. So I can't, I don't know. I think there was just something wrong with people in the 1840s is what I'm saying. I feel like humans have had jokes for a long time. Yeah. And jokes are a thing that have been studied somewhat, but not all the time. Sometimes they're just not treated as significant by thinkers, scholars, writers, publishers. So this joke, it's the earliest writing down of Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road is from 1847.

Could be older than that, but another number there is this joke is at least 177 years old. It was also well known enough that in 1911, so more than 100 years ago, 1911, the cover of Puck magazine was an illustration of chickens that got run over by a car referencing this joke. It said, why does the chicken cross the road as a caption? So that's like this joke getting to host SNL, but in 1911, like being the cover of the very popular humor magazine, Puck magazine. I saw the image. It's not as graphic as you might be imagining. The chickens are not eviscerated. They don't look like what a chicken would probably look like having been bisected by an automobile.

They are just chickens that look dazed or on their backs. So don't panic. No chicken gore in this episode. I don't think I'm hoping. Yeah, they look like they got like knocked out by the car, but not just like exploded by the car. Right, right. Also, it's several chickens and not just one. Yeah, I guess.

So I guess my question is, were the people in that car trying to hit those chickens? Because like they hit multiple chickens and those chickens are like not in a straight line with each other. To me, it looks like they had a bunch of chickens in the car and they're like tossing them out of the car as they drive along. Like it doesn't read to me like this car just hit all these chickens. It looks like they're just tossing chickens out of the car like they're tossing rubbish or something yeah but i know that's not the intention it's just the look of this puck magazine you have a lot of explaining to do with your poorly constructed art yeah they just like sucked all the eggs out of the chickens like you were like if you were like getting toothpaste out of a tube and then just chuck the chicken over their shoulder just just

directly squeezing the cloaca. Yeah, yeah. And they're just like, oh, this one's out, Chuck. The very last number this week is two. It turns out there are two potential meanings of Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? And we're going to make that takeaway number one. Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road is either a meta joke about comedy or a dark joke about a chicken choosing to die. Yeah, that makes sense. That's actually my two interpretations of the joke. So yeah, I agree. I agree.

Yeah, like both would explain its popularity. And before researching this joke, I had only thought it was a meta joke and not funny. I didn't think of that second meaning. And I'm sure some other people didn't as well. Yeah, I guess that I always took it as like an like it's like anti-comedy and that it's like setting up for a twist that doesn't exist. And like the setup for the twist, it's like the, you know, why the chicken across the road to get to the other side is such an obvious answer to that question but if you're setting it up with like five minutes of like prepare for a witticism young one and then you like basically like have like kind of a limp like punch line it's sort of like heed my chicken riddles yeah yeah totally it's like it kind of feels like the setup is the joke and like the lack of a like the lack of a fulfilling twist is what's funny about it.

I've considered but like both options have occurred to me and I simply have not ever attempted to figure out which one it is because my desire to do so has not come up until this podcast. My desire to do so has not come up until this podcast. Wait, explain the chicken wants to die take on the joke. I've never heard that. Get to the other, like the other side is like. Oh, the other side of, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Being dead, right? Like the other side, the afterlife. So like, and crossing the road is tricky for a chicken.

You know, you could get hit. And then why did the chicken cross the road to get to the other side? Like, so to die, essentially, I didn't necessarily, I didn't necessarily interpret it as like the chicken wants to die. It's that the chicken will die as a result of crossing the road. And so it's like, why did it do this? Well, to die, Not that it wants to die, just that it will. I don't know. Now. Okay. So hearing that, that does make me feel like,

you know, that, that take on the joke was immortalized in the Bone Thugs-N-Harmony song Crossroads. I don't know. It was about their take on this joke. was about their take on this joke. Not the Britney Spears film, Crossroads? And I'm trying to think of things named Crossroads. Yeah, it could be all. It could be like, sure, all of them are canon in the chicken verse. Do we have any answers to which is correct?

Or is it that just going to be lost to time as the ancient Sumerian joke has been? It's simply that both work. And it probably explains the popularity that this can both be, like we've said, an anti-joke with no real joke to it, or this dark joke where there is actual joke construction. There's the double meaning of a chicken crossing the road to get to the other side of the road and the chicken crossing the road being killed by the danger and then crossing to the afterlife and the other side. That version actually has a joke joke. It's not a joke about jokes. Right. Ow, my head. So they just both coexist. My brain.

You could picture somebody from the 1800s delivering the joke and then following it up with like, car screech, or like something like that. Like an act out or something like, is it in that case? Is this the perfect joke? It could be. I like the idea of is this the perfect joke? Could be. I like the idea of, is this the perfect joke? It's almost the perfect joke for the purpose of becoming a popular and well-known joke. Because you can tell it to anyone as an anti-joke, or you can pass it around as this dark joke where people are like, oh, this is darker than the average joke. That helps explain why everybody's heard of it and why it's a stereotype of a joke. It's also a good cautionary tale for chickens to learn good traffic safety. I mean, to me, all, all, all good jokes have to be cautionary tales. Like the one about the man from Nantucket. Oh, um, I, so I, I visited Nantucket Island. Um,

like I, I had like a, like a film I was working on that was a screening at a festival there last summer. And the amount of things in that place named the man from Nantucket or like some version of that is insane. It's like that entire that entire island is like every bar is named like the man from Nantucket or something or some version of that. There are shirts that you could buy there. They're like, I'm the man from Nantucket or something or some version of that. There are shirts that you could buy there. They're like, I'm the man from Nantucket. Like, you know, or like I married the man from Nantucket. You know, they really it's like they're really. Yeah, they're really milking that limerick, which now that I've just said that, it's unfortunate

phrasing for that specific limerick. Yeah, it's like basically Nantucket Island. It's it's things out things named after two things it's that limerick or moby dick because the the ship that moby dick is based off of apparently like landed or took off from nantucket island yeah our two greatest cultural works guys don't have anything else going on there in nantucket no no hobbies not wailing and limericks yeah well when you can do what the guy can do, what other hoppies do you need, right? Come on.

Come on. Dirty. Anyway. Yeah, this joke, it sort of illustrates a lot of the logic and cultural role of jokes, at least in the United States, because jokes are fun to ruminate on. One source for this is a book called Stop Me If You've Heard This, A History of Philosophy and Jokes

by New Yorker magazine contributor Jim Holt. He says that jokes fall into the category of folklore along with myths, proverbs, legends, nursery rhymes, rhythms, and superstitions. And he says that we pass them around because we find some meaning in them. He also points out that jokes can indicate neuroses or compulsions or guilt. He cites an amazing survey of jokes being told in New York City in 1963.

Somebody went around New York City in 1963. They cataloged more than 13,000 jokes that people were familiar with. And they found that the number one topic was sex. And then the number two topic was what the surveyor called Negroes. What? Because there was just like the civil rights movement going on and all American racism going on. And so people did jokes about that. Oh, no. And so the anti-humor meaning of this joke, it helps explain its popularity because you can tell Oh, no. shows is sort of their end point to humor so it's like they might not necessarily be crafting a perfect joke themselves but it's like you know quoting rick and morty or something like that

gives them like a shorthand to be just like the funny person at the office and i wonder if like jokes like this were kind of the you know 1800s early 1900s version of that where it's sort of like this is an opportunity for you to like, you know, be the class clown at your job. But like, you know, and this is this is a joke that probably everybody's kind of heard. You know, it's sort of like, it's like a plug and play. Yeah, it's it's the my wife of the late 1800s, early 1900s, where like everyone was quoting Borat during that time. Foreign people funny was basically the joke in Borat and every office loved it. If there's ever like a short film or a documentary or a book written about this joke, I want the quote on the back of the book to be Katie Golden.

It's basically the my wife of the 1800s. Yeah. Look, I stand by it. Not by the my wife joke, just by the comparison. Yeah, it feels very, why did Borat cross the road to get to my wife? It's everyone could just do it. It took me zero brain cells to say. Yeah, why did the Garfield cross the road? We've just elevated the jokes. Why did the Garfield cross the road? Because it wasn't a Monday.

Swish. Right. Just boom, boom, boom. Easy, easy. Yeah. If we combine all of the bad jokes together, they become good. This is the math that we've learned. Why did Alex Schmidt cross the road?

To stop people from listening to his secret podcast. That's so me. Yeah. And yeah, so then it has spread far and wide that way. And then the whole other way, there's this afterlife sense. And I'm going to link three different examples of the internet, either thinking of it or finding out about it. Like Esquire UK, the Indianapolis Star Buzzfeed, they each grabbed a Twitter or Reddit post that blew up because someone said, oh my gosh, this joke is also a real joke about death. Isn't that amazing?

And it is amazing. And so it's probably the other way this is spread. And when we were talking about publication of it, that 1911 Puck magazine cover is probably kind of referencing that. Like, why did the chicken cross the road and then a bunch of chickens depicted as dead run over by a car is one example of people long ago noticing this can have a dark tone and a real joke to it if you want to. This is why you had to warn people excessively that a joke was about to happen, because they would be shocked and horrified to learn of these chickens dying on the road. Yeah. It was too shocking. And folks, we have so much more to say about this joke and also the reality of

chickens and roads, and we'll dig into it with more takeaways after a quick break. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty.

This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls.

And we are back with two more takeaways for this main episode because takeaway number two. The joke about a chicken crossing the road might have tapped into early 1900s anxieties about the dangers of car culture. Ooh, I know about this. Ooh. I wrote a, there's a Some More News episode called Do We Really Need All These Cars? It's about the history of how the U.S. was basically designed around the automobile. And there was a lot of resistance at first to that, because people kept getting killed by cars. And people were not happy about that. They're like,

oh my god, like you, because like before, like even with like horse carriages, to some extent, like people were upset when horse carriages became common on roads, because like people walked around the roads, but then cars just amplified that problem. Pedestrians used to have a lot of privilege in terms of being on the roads. And so this idea that now you have to like give up all of that area to cars was unwelcome at the time. And it had to be lobbied against, like the car industry really lobbied to change public perception from being that roads are for pedestrians to roads are exclusively for cars. And if you use the roads as a pedestrian, you are an ignorant, backwater, buck-toothed dum-dum. Yeah, that's all dead on. And it also helps explain why this joke is the joke, if that makes sense. Because there's all kinds of ways to do an anti-comedy, and there's a lot of ways to do this to the other side, kind of double meaning.

The early 1900s, especially in the US and the UK and a few other countries like that, was a time of new and major motor vehicle danger, and possibly the historical peak of cars specifically running over chickens. Yeah. And isn't that where the term peak of cars specifically running over chickens. Yeah. And isn't that where the term like, like jaywalking, I mean, I think jaywalking is like a, I'm sure it probably is probably some like slur or something like that, but like. It's well, Jay. Yeah.

It's, it's a classist sort of thing because like jaywalking, it's meant to say like, I think it's like referencing more rural people as being Jays, like people who come into the city who aren't from the city. And so you're basically calling them a hick. Like you're saying you're a jaywalker, meaning like you're a hickwalker, like you're an ignorant, you know. And the reason I said that was not to malign people of different regional origins. It is because that was how people were depicted in these cartoons, these car industry cartoons of like people who jaywalk. Yeah. That does bring up a really good point of like the popularization of this joke

was like probably at peak chickens getting obliterated by cars time. So maybe it did start as a dark joke and maybe it's just kind of weirdly become kind of an anti-comedy joke just because it's like, I mean, nowadays so few chickens get obliterated by cars. I only see that like, what, four or five times a day when it used to be just constantly. Yeah. It's from a few things, mainly motor vehicles. And then a little secondarily, just that there were a lot more small family farms back then. So like an individual farmer might lose a chicken. And now we've mostly industrialized and large scaled that.

Now we don't let the chickens outside so they won't get hit by cars. Aren't we nice? And the key sources here, there's amazing digital resources from the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University in North Dakota. Also a piece from the Detroit News by Bill Loomis. And then a book called Car by Gregory Votolato about the history of cars and car culture. Also going to link Katie's episode of Somewhere News about cars and car culture, because that's a great source for this too. Plugging our own stuff now. So I have a question.

How many chickens do we think Teddy Roosevelt personally obliterated with his car in his life? I feel like the answer is like no, he rode horses and lots of chickens with the horse. Just constant hooves over chickens. It's like you know the answer

is greater than zero. Yeah. He did it in like a military hat. Like, oh, look at me. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's almost impossible to understate how much the United States suddenly was full of cars in the first two decades of the 1900s. The main stat from Gregory Votolato's book is that in 1900, there were 8,000 cars registered with motor vehicles departments in the US. In the year 1900, 8,000 cars. By 1912, 12 years later, there were 1 million. So just suddenly the country was full of cars, Just suddenly the country was full of cars, mainly driven by new drivers and in a time of no traffic or safety laws and heavy drinking.

Like no seatbelts. No seatbelts, exactly. And it was just like an incredibly suddenly dangerous time. Yeah, and there were like attempts to limit speed so that it wouldn't kill so many people. I don't know that people cared about the chickens being mangled. But yeah, it was labeled by the car industry, which sort of did a campaign against these very low speed limits in towns by saying like, look, this is just like this is like China because they have a great wall of China. And this is like the great wall of car speed limits. And it's just using, because like, it's just using racism to, and xenophobia. And so it's just, it's kind of interesting, the history of like, well, why did we cede this territory to cars?

And why were they pancake-ifying so many chickens? Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's exactly what you said earlier about just, you know, car manufacturers lobbying super hard. I think that jaywalking is a crime. And like using that term, which is like, you know, like a classist term to basically like shame anybody who's like not seating the right of way to cars. And I get that it's a safety thing, but it's also just like how car centric the united states

is and it's like i feel like a lot of zoomers are just like i just don't i don't want a car like i just i'll just lift everywhere i'll like walk or whatever i'll use public transit yeah car culture sucks that's the real theme of this episode or maybe this is just chicken propaganda to try to yeah it is the chickens to have primacy over the roads. I mean, they did just back a fresh truck of roasted chicken to my apartment. So, you know, like, yeah. Why did the chicken cross the road? So Joey could eat them.

So Joey could get swole. I keep turning down this yummy sound dial, but it's not going far enough. It can't do it. We had to cut out about 30 minutes of the podcast, which is just chewing sounds. Yeah, which is just me eating chicken bones and you can hear the crunch. It's just the gristle noise. The gristle noise is really tricky to edit out my mic my phone absolutely coated in grease it's got a sheen it's shiny

yeah and and this sudden beginning of car culture people were primarily concerned with the human injuries and deaths in the early 1920s cities like like New York and Washington, D.C. held what are called safety parades, where people did a protest calling out the lack of safety and accountability. At one of them, they had 10,000 children dress as ghosts to represent more than 10,000 children killed by U.S. cars that year. Dark. Yeah. And so along with that, people also noticed that animals were getting hit by cars. That 1911 Puck magazine cover is at least partly pointing it out. Puck also did a cover the year before 1910, where a motorist's car is pursued by the many ghosts of the animals that

they have run over and killed. That was a magazine cover. That's metal. That's super metal. I love that. Yeah. I love that. Yeah, I'm just going to say, not super familiar with Puck magazine, but based on these two covers, they rock. Yeah, they're pretty based, apparently. It's great. Yeah, I'm a big, big fan. And yeah, and so roadkill, not only was it a real phenomenon people were concerned about, but on some level, it was a way to talk about the human deaths without directly thinking about the human deaths. And so maybe this joke has some origin in that. Like roads as danger was a dominant theme of the 1900s and 1910s, and then people wanted jokes about it because it was in the zeitgeist. Yeah, jokes are always kind of a way to cope with current situations, I think. So that makes sense to me.

Yeah. There's also one amazing thing here where, like we said, there were small farmers possibly losing chickens. There was a lot of chicken raising by the early 1900s by farmers. And the Theodore Roosevelt Center has a specific written account of someone observing a chicken dying when trying to cross a road with cars in it. This was recorded by a historical society in Sheffield in the UK and passed along to them. They had the text of an early 1900s travelogue about a car road trip where the writer says they, quote, watched another member of the poultry suicide club. Jesus. Rush out of a safe ditch and prepare to take leave for immortality, end quote. Well, that's dramatic. Right. And they recorded it as common. They're like, yet again, I'm seeing a chicken cross a dangerous road and get splattered. So this joke is almost topical to that era. And it has maybe almost been garbled in the anti-humor sense. Yeah, I think that that's something I was talking about earlier. There's this

really great book, I think it's called like Finding Springfield, about the Simpsons and how the Simpsons originally started as being counterculture. But now it's so prevalent and popular that it's just become culture. And it's not like it's not like counter to anything because it just is the mainstream culture. And I mean, like, you know, talking about that with Garfield and stuff like that is like, you know, now we look at Garfield as sort of the, the, the references that he contains of just like, he likes lasagna, he hates Mondays and et cetera. But if you think about it, it's like Garfield was like a counterculture comic that Jim Davis wrote in the seventies in that, you know, in a time where, um, uh, you know, like have a nice day, like, you know,

like, uh, everybody like, you know, work hard, enjoy your lives, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It was like so prevalent, like having a character that was a cartoon cat that was like, I hate Mondays. Cause that's the day you work. I like, don't like dieting. Like I'm all about self-care. I'm not worried about like, you know, being, I'm not worried about being the version of me that society wants me to be. I just want to make myself happy. And like, you know, I think that you can look at this joke as like a very early version of that, of like, yeah, it was probably it probably was the super dark version of it. It was commenting on like, you know, chickens getting obliterated by cars constantly and sort of like a comment on car culture. And now it's like we just kind of get it for the reference of like, oh, that's that old joke, you know?

I think what you're saying is that you either die a Calvin and Hobbes or live long enough to become a Garfield. Oh, we can only be so lucky. That's all exactly dead on. Yeah. And it's such an interesting cultural role for this joke that I have primarily ignored or been annoyed by my whole life. What a good topic, Ed. One more just quick takeaway for this main show here. Kind of talking about the situation of the real birds today.

Takeaway number three. If a chicken wants to cross a road safely, it should use a purpose-built wildlife crossing or sneak through a storm drain. This is about two ways that animals are now safely crossing roads. One of them is the long time sneaking through storm drains. And then there's also a nice new movement of wildlife crossings through human roads. of wildlife crossings through human roads. I like the way that you framed that was just like those squares use those crossings, but the cool chickens use the storm drains. Yeah.

I've seen raccoons use storm drains, like pop into one storm drain, pop out of another one. My cat actually followed, I think, some squirrel or something down into a storm drain. We thought she was going to die, but then she popped out of another storm drain. Like a Mario. My cat was Mario. Okay. Did any of you crawl around storm drains for fun growing up?

Inside the storm drain? Yeah, like inside the storm drains. No. A buddy of mine did that in Ohio. I haven't done it myself. I don't know how I would get it. I mean, maybe it depends on like, like the shape of the storm drain, but I couldn't like get in there.

How would you even get down in there? Yeah, I feel like that was just, I mean, I grew up in like in Washington state and like it was, it was like, like on a res in kind of like the, like kind of, uh, away from like a lot of, uh, cool businesses and stuff like that. There wasn't like a ton to do. So it's like, that's something that like me and my friends would do sometimes. We just like crawl, crawl around in storm drains. It's not like a city storm drain. It's like essentially a big, uh, cement tube that kind of like goes, that's kind of like separates like one part of a ditch from like another part of a ditch that allows for like cars to drive over past for like people's,

um, you know, for like entrances into like cul-de-sacs and stuff like that. So it wasn't, Oh, I would have totally, if we had those, I would have totally been in there. Yeah. It was like, it was a weird summer where it's like, I just did that with a lot of my friends until like, I don't know, I think just like older kids were like, that's real dangerous. You should maybe not do that. And then I was like, oh. Yeah. And that, that storm rain size thing is dead on. It could be very big. That is one way animals love to get around the otherwise extremely dangerous and isolating situation of human roads. It can create a situation that is called landscape dissection, where landmasses are almost like separate islands because of our roads

for a population of animals. Right. That sounds very visceral, too, when you think about it in the context of roads not being safe for animals. Yeah, pretty visceral. One source for this, it's an amazing show called Outside In, which is a radio show and podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio. They say that landscape dissection can be so extreme that in one case in the US Rocky Mountains, scientists know which side of one highway the grizzly bears are born on based on their DNA, because just the populations are not meeting. Oh, wow. Yeah, there's a lot of genetic difference in the mountain lions in Los Angeles due to the

sort of like cutoffs of the streets, the roads, highways, and freeways and such. Yeah, that's another big example. If people aren't from there and don't know, there are mountain lions in the mountains within and around LA and freeways like the 101 separate the populations. And then they are finally building a crossing for mountain lions to use on the 101 that will be completed in 2025. It'll be the biggest wildlife crossing in the world. Is it going to be the Hyperloop? Is it going to have a bunch of bright LED lights and the cougars go around and teslas yeah it'll shoot animals through a vacuum tube across the freeway it's like one of those pneumatic tubes for animals like the salmon tube launcher have y'all seen that oh yeah i have seen that so many times i love that so much yeah yeah it's a it's a long flexible tube that uses some kind of like hose pressure to transport salmon from one body of water to another in case of like some disruption of their migration.

But it's like a man-made thing to help these fish be transported. And it's fantastic. Yeah. to help these fish be transported. And it's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, it's essentially like a water slide in reverse where it's like it basically sucks up the salmon and then like, you know, along with water,

like just shoots them out of the other side. So they'll like catch air and then like land in the body of water. It's great. Yeah, and that's kind of the other solution here because we have had storm drains that just accidentally let animals cross. And Katie, it's amazing you've seen a raccoon use one, because that's kind of the primary animal doing this.

Of course they are. They're so smart. And one expert tracking their movements has called storm drains raccoon superhighways in North America. It's how they do it. They're the rogues. They're the rogues of the animal kingdom. You know, you've got the paladins, I think probably rhinos or something. Rhinos, the most virtuous of all animals. I mean, they're pretty good. They're pretty nice,

but strict, harsh, but fair. Chickens are your friend who won't just learn how D&D works and keeps asking what the rules are. Like, come on, stop squawking and just like keep up. Yeah. Cats are the rule lawyers who are just like, I mean, technically I should be able to roll a D20 on this. Yeah. And these storm drains, they're also used by opossums. They're even the big ones that we were describing are used by white-tailed deer can go through a storm drain, even though you're thinking of like the sewer where Pennywise lives, that doesn't make sense. It's too small, but big ones, they can do it. You know, I actually think I have seen a coyote and a badger go through a storm drain together

as friends and emerge as best friends. No, because coyotes and badgers sometimes hang out. Yeah, no, it's true. They sometimes hang out to like hunt together. And now that I think of it, I should have realized that you can like play around in storm drains because, yeah, I've seen this video. They are like going through this like tube, which must be like this big storm drain. And it's just a coyote and a badger. And the coyote is super excited and the badger is just kind of lumbering along.

It's very cute. And also their improvisational use of storm drains has saved a lot of animal lives, maintained more genetic diversity in these populations getting to connect than otherwise would happen. The good news about human activity on purpose is that we're beginning to build wildlife crossings for animals. Apparently, the first ones ever on purpose were built in the 1970s for the requests of hunters in Europe who wanted game animal populations to connect. Well, fair enough. It's better than nothing. Like, keep them alive so we can kill them.

It's very Theodore Roosevelt, yeah. I don't want to kill them with a car like a commoner. I want to kill them with a gun like a hero. Right, right. Right, yeah. Yeah, and now there's amazing conservation-oriented ones. In many U.S. states, including Massachusetts and California, there are small tunnels under roads for salamander migrations. In the country of Kenya, there's a highway underpass for elephants that hundreds of them use every year.

Oh, I think I've seen pictures of that. It's really cool. Yeah, and it's this amazing range of stuff. And the U.S.'s 2021 Federal Infrastructure Act set aside $350 million to build new wildlife crossings in our roads because we have very few of them. On average, we have one wildlife crossing per 4,000 miles of road. 4,000 miles is the distance between Florida and Juneau, Alaska. So we don't have a ton of these crossings. Let's build more. Let's help the chickens and all the other animals get across.

Yeah, I think that's that is truly why the chicken crossed the road to set an example for the future. that is like a nice end to the story of like car culture taking over so heavily that, you know, like chickens being obliterated by cars is necessitating the need for a well-told joke about it. Whereas now we're to the point where it's like understanding that it's more important that we like live in concert with the environment and like, I don't know, it's like, yeah, exactly what you're talking about, about creating, um, you know, essentially like land islands where it's like the only way that a bear can get to its like, you know, original hunting territory is like to cross a 12 lane highway and hope it doesn't get obliterated by a truck. Like going from that to like, no, we should build like land bridges. So we're not jerks to these bears. Like, I think that I don't know, that's like hopefully a nice end to that joke.

Yeah. The joke was us to that joke. Yeah. The joke was us the whole time. Yeah, it was. We were the monsters all along. Really? We were. We drove the cars. We're on the other side.

Ooh. Yay. Ooh. Or a progress meaning? It's changing again. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, who knows? My head hurts.

Hey, folks, that's the main episode for this week. And I want to say an additional thank you to our special guest, Joey Clift. Old buddy, one of our favorite guests. And I'm glad he came back for a whole nother one, especially one where we could get one additional comedy writer onto this wonderful comedy topic. I'd also encourage you to check out Joey Clift's comedy writing right this second. You can go to gone native dot TV. That's where you'll find wonderful comedy shorts by Joey about weird stuff that Native American people and indigenous people have to deal with often in modern society. And it's a

really fun and incisive and brilliant look at it. Additional to that tip, this outro has a bunch of other fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, why did the chicken cross the road is either a meta joke about comedy or a dark joke about a chicken choosing to die. Takeaway number two, the joke about a chicken crossing the road might have tapped into early 1900s anxieties about the dangerousness of car culture. Takeaway number three, if a chicken wants to cross a road safely, it should use purpose-built wildlife crossings or sneak through a storm drain. Plus numbers about when this joke originated, when chickens crossed real roads, United States national security, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now

if you become a member at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the astounding internal magnetic compass of chickens and what that tells us about bird evolution. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 15 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation and makes this podcast a thing. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org.

Key sources this week include the book Stop Me If You've Heard This, A History of Philosophy and Jokes by New Yorker magazine contributor Jim Holt, the book Car by Gregory Votolato, digital resources from the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University in North Dakota, and further reporting from the Detroit News, CBS News, Atlas Obscura, The Guardian, and other great sources. Obscura, The Guardian, and other great sources. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadagook people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy. Joey taped this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Ortongva and K'iche' and Chumash peoples. And like we do every week, I want to acknowledge that in my location, also in Joey's location, and many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And you can join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's

description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 86. That's about the topic of tuna. Fun fact about bluefin tuna, as our cultural relationship to that food has changed, its price rose in the United States by more than 2,000%, and rose in Japan by more than 10,000%. So I recommend that episode.

I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals and science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members, and thank you to all our listeners.

I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating So how about that? Talk to you then. We will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported

directly by you.