Title: Sick Chicken

General Information about Item:

• Joke
• Not language-specific

Informant Data:

• Ci Yu Yan is a 3-2 Dual Degree student from Vassar College who’s studying computer engineering at Dartmouth.

Contextual Data:

• Social Context
  • This is a piece of folklore that would likely be shared among peers in a light-hearted manner. If shared among engineers, it would be humorous self-deprecation. If shared among a rivaling scientific field, it would be to mock engineers.

• Cultural Context
  • This joke makes humorous light of a common challenge engineers face: the practice of making necessary simplifications to models without compromising its practicality. From outside the cultural perspective, an audience to the joke could easily pick up on the fact that the humor is in the absurdity of the simplifications the engineer makes when assessing the chicken. However, there is more nuance to understanding the joke. Good modeling is usually a trade-off. A complicated and specific model might give the most accurate result, but it may be entirely impractical to compute. On the other end of the spectrum, an overly-simplified model is practical to work with, but may be grossly inaccurate. One of the biggest frustrations in engineering is creating a model that works in theory, and falls apart in practice. The simplifications that an engineer makes are meant to be almost secret–the non-informed spectator should trust that the engineer’s model is “correct” to the real world system, even though the real system is so vastly complicated that no doubt simplifications and assumptions needed to be made. The joke makes light of that “secret” coming to light in a clumsy, absurd way.The engineer has taken an extremely complicated system–a living creature–and applied some of the most basic and reductive assumptions that engineers like to work with–spherical shape and no air friction. Obviously, the model falls apart, so the humor comes from an engineer understanding the absurd hyperbole of the common occurrence of a model being oversimplified.

Item:

A farmer has some chickens, except one of these chickens is sick, so he hires an engineer to look at his chicken and see what’s wrong.

The engineer comes, observes the chicken, does some calculations and says, “Okay, I know what’s wrong with your chicken, but only if it’s spherical and in a vacuum.”

Transcript:

• Chrissy: Alright, so what’s your name and background?
• Ci Yu: Ci Yu Yan. Background is a 3-2 student from Vassar doing electrical engineering.
• Chrissy: And what’s the joke?
• Ci Yu: Okay so this is a joke I heard on tv, but, um. So, this farmer has all these chickens, except one of these chickens is sick, so he hires an engineer to like, look at his chicken and see what’s wrong. So the engineer comes and observes the chicken and does all these calculations and is like, “Okay, I know what’s wrong with your chicken, but only if it’s spherical and in a vacuum.”
• Chrissy: Okay, and what’s the explanation of the joke?
• Ci Yu: So the explanation of the joke is that, um, when you like take any physics or engineering classes, a lot of the, like, problems are simplified to like have very ideal conditions without including, like, a lot of things like friction or other disturbances so, yeah.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Collector’s Name: Christina Long

Tags/Keywords:

• Joke. Sick chicken. Vacuum. Engineering. Hyperbole.