“Why did the chicken cross the road?”
“To get to the other side.”

A coworker, I’ll call him Umberto, recently claimed that there was another view of this tired old joke. He said that the joke was about suicide and that “the other side” was a euphemism for death. The chicken was tired of life, or couldn’t take it anymore, or something, and wanted to get run over. 

We all agreed that we hadn’t thought of the joke that way but there was enough of a whiff of plausibility about it so that we wouldn’t dismiss it too quickly.

The only issue was the way that Umberto had introduced the subject. He’d planned on starting with “Why did the chicken cross the road” like I did. 

Unfortunately, he started the story with “Knock, knock.” He was a couple of sentences into the story when he realized his mistake, apologized, and started again. 

It’d be nice to blame this on alcohol, but I’m not convinced that it was the beer’s fault.