Is this a dead chicken? (Punchline from a family story)

Some statements only make sense if you are familiar with a story told in your family. My mother told us one about two of her younger cousins back in the city of Cincinnati. The older one, Gil, was in the fourth grade. His school class recently had been on a field trip to a meat packing plant. They were eating fried chicken for dinner when Gil inquired:

“How was this chicken killed?”   

His younger brother Phil (in the second grade), who never had considered where the food on his plate came from, pushed his plate away and asked in disgust:

“Is this a dead chicken?

In our family that punchline is used to describe situations where you are dismayed to find how things actually work. I don’t know if Phil became a vegetarian.   

Those whose childhood included grandparents on farms know how a chicken is killed. On page 113 of the 1989 book Bill Neal’s Southern Cooking he describes the process:

“When my grandmother wanted chicken and dumplings, my sister and I were sent to do battle in the hen yard. Brandishing little rods with crookneck ends, we felt like Roman soldiers among the Sabines. In wild pursuit, we ran in a crouch, with our garnering weapons outstretched to catch the hooks around a leg of the prey. Success depended on tripping the hen up with a jerk of the left hand while grabbing its feet quickly with the right hand. Squawking and head down, the hen was received by my waiting grandmother, who dispatched it with a quick wring of the neck.”

Back on March 1, 2013 in a post titled Does your speaking voice sound like a little girl? I mentioned another family punchline: “You’re making my horse sick.”

The image of a piece of fried chicken served at Popeyes came from Wikimedia Commons.

There also are comedy routines with well-known punchlines, like the Saturday Night Live skit More Cowbell (about Blue Oyster Cult recording The Reaper). Probably the most cowbell is in Hugh Masekela’s instrumental Grazing in the Grass.