They tell us that something is waiting for us on The Other Side, that death may be a pilgrimage and not a destination, that the afterlife is a warm awakening after the fretful dream of life.
The joke wasn't always about a suicidal bird.
By 1847, it had become a well-known anti-joke. Instead of a typical punchline, the chicken joke purposefully delivers a disappointing resolution.
In 1899, Henry H. Bliss was struck by a taxicab -- the first recorded car casualty in the US.
The US made more cars, faster cars, heavier cars; one could maim/kill oneself by stepping into oncoming traffic. All high-speed roads became portals to The Other Side.
Any arbitrary animal could've crossed the road, but we coincidentally chose the "chicken" -- an enduring symbol of cowardice.
The way that they did and to grin like lions
Upon the pikes o’ th’ hunters. Then began
A stop i’ th’ chaser, a retire; anon
A rout, confusion thick. Forthwith they fly
Chickens the way which they ⌜stooped⌝ eagles; slaves
The strides ⌜they⌝ victors made; and now our cowards,
Like fragments in hard voyages, became-- Shakespeare, Cymbeline (1623)
In games of chicken, players demonstrate courage by yielding later than other players. Game theorists model such payoff matrices like this:
| Swerve | Stay | |
|---|---|---|
| Swerve | 0, 0 | -1, +1 |
| Stay | +1, -1 | -∞, -∞ |
This game normally has three Nash equilibria (i.e. stable strategies): (1) always chicken, (2) never chicken, or (3) match your opponent's stochastic strategy.
But not all chicken games are symmetric. When a lone man challenges armored vehicles, it feels callous to cram life into a lopsided payoff matrix.
The chicken joke is an anti-joke that morphed into an actual joke, but we've induced jamais vu. Over and over again, humans teach the new humans that pointlessness is the point.
But when we search for meaning in the seemingly meaningless, we discover motor vehicles, mathematics, misery, metahumor -- much more than a mere joke. Pulling that fraying string in your underpants, you find that the entire universe unfurls and, against all odds, everything remains connected.
Chinese authorities largely ignored Taylor Swift's T.S. 1989, which unintentionally memorialized the Tienneman Square (TS) 1989 incident.
Those hoodies were likely made in China and conceived in the United States -- Taylor Swift's US propaganda outsourced to Chinese sweat shops, then resold to US consumers to fuel Chinese propaganda, and then sensationalized/compressed into clickbait for US media outlets to advertise more McNuggets (which are ostensibly chicken).
There's nothing humorous about suicidal chickens, nor traffic fatalities, nor game theory, nor Tienneman Square, nor Taylor Swift. But it's funny if you think about it.