Several years ago I was teaching students in my web-design course how to use frames. (A frameset is a dodgy way to cut a browser window into smaller pieces, or frames, each containing its own web page. The internal frame, or iframe, is the accepted way to do this today.)

Even back in the day, before frames were formally deprecated by the W3C web gurus, I encouraged my students to believe that frames are evil. But they still had to know about them. So instead of a canned exercise, I gave students an archive of text files containing alternative answers to the classic chicken joke, and I told them to present them in a website using frames.

You already know what I’m talking about, right? People sometimes invent answers to the chicken joke that make fun of some philosopher, artist, politician, or celebrity. For example:

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Karl Marx: It was driven by the lash of economic necessity.

After creating a few versions of this chicken joke assignment (for successive classes), I became a connoisseur of chicken joke answers. For instance, the Karl Marx answer cited above is the best of three or four that I’ve seen.

Before long I went from evaluating other people’s answers to writing my own. I posted some of these on my first blog, where some of them were very popular. So in April 2009 I set up this blog, devoted solely to chicken jokes.

The answers I didn’t write myself are tagged with wish-I-thoughta-that. My rules for a good chicken joke are that the answer should be:

1. funny or satirical
2. not too obvious
3. responding to the riddle (not a random “characteristic” phrase)

Am I spending too much time and energy on this? Yeah, probably. Hope you enjoy it.

If you want to pitch in, do NOT post your email here or anywhere else on the Web! Leave a comment below and check back later.

You might also want to read the other blog.