>I never understood that joke. Is it supposed to be an anti-joke? That's the only way it makes any sense as a joke.

It's just a joke based on going against the listener's common expectations -- like almost all jokes.

They expect a specific intent for crossing the road -- and having something to do with the fact that the being doing the crossing is a chicken, but instead they get the obvious and most immediate and base reason for anybody crossing a road.

Right, that's what makes it an anti-joke. Anti jokes can be funny. Just, it's weird that it's one of the first jokes we're introduced to growing up, because it's not a typical or even basic kind of joke.

It's the introductory example of an anti-joke in the culture's humor-teaching curriculum.

A lot of the jokes that we tell kids are actually teaching them the basics of what is considered funny in our culture. Much of it demonstrates how to establish a pattern or preconception, then break or subvert it for the desired comedic effect.

For instance, you can't tell "banana-banana-orange" or "interrupting cow" as your first knock-knock joke, because you first have to establish the pattern of a "proper" knock-knock joke.

After the chicken crosses the road, you tell some shaggy dog stories, then you hit them with the never-ending setup, where the joke is in how long you can get them to listen to your pointless rambling while waiting for a punchline that never comes.

A very common joke among children where I live is a word play on "catch up" vs "ketchup".

However, I live in Sweden, and the joke makes avsolutely no sense in swedish. I was 15 before I got it.

Haha, we have the same thing in Iceland. It basically turns it into "Two tomatoes were walking across the road when one was hit by a car. The other one said, 'come here you tomato sauce'", which is a terrible terrible joke :)

My daughter messed it up even more and started with "Two tomato sauces were walking across the road..." at which point it's no longer a joke, just a story about a traffic accident...

I heard some speculation that it is a play on the "other side", i.e. death, in other words the chicken will get killed crossing the road but will still get to the "other side". Which would make it a proper punchline, though obtuse in the extreme!

That strikes me as when an author writes a story and then years later an interviewer asks her how she came up with such an amazing subtle metaphor. To which the author replies... they didn't, the reviewer is reading something into it that wasn't intended.