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Chicken chicken chicken

Yoram Bauman
Talks
YouTube
5 HN users recommended this talk6 months2013–2026 score 7.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Beloved as a humor masterpiece and often cited as required viewing on what not to do in an academic talk.

Doug Zongker's deadpan conference presentation of his famously chicken-filled paper, given at the 2007 AAAS humor session. It satirizes academic talks while showing the pitfalls of bad presentation.

“The presentation is truly a humor masterpiece.” (HN, 2023)

4 strong recommendations · 3 recommendations · 1 citations · 6 jokes · Talks

14 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@jerf Nov 2018 Strongly recommends
on HN thread A History of the Sentence "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo." (1999-2015)
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It may not be the original video, but a video presentation of it is available at [this video] by the original author, contrary to the link's claims. It is probably the better way to approach the paper, due to the importance of timing in comedy and the fact that paper presents so much to you in a way that it can't control the timing, though unfortunately the video resolution is quite low. Plus the Q&A is pretty good. It is an amusing combination of video that is a trenchant commentary on the excessive similarity of the vast bulk of hard science papers, and a video that my four year old enjoyed back in the day. That puts your standard "family friendly" comedy movie to shame in terms of how much comedy ground it is capable of covering.
Video presentation of the paper, better than reading it; funny commentary.
@jerf Apr 2023 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken [pdf]
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If you've read a lot of papers and/or attended conference presentations, you will find that you almost know what he is saying in the presentation version: [this video] . The same charts in every presentation; up and to the right, my thing higher than previous thing, here's some boxes and lines that really mean nothing in this context, some standardized statistical distribution with my dots scattered about... there's a fairly standard presentation that one could give with almost just a few made up payload words for your thing and it would apply to almost anything. I particularly remember in one of my machine learning classes where we had to give project presentations, the degree to which you could almost substitute the slide decks for each other and it would have been hard to notice. It doesn't mean that they have no content necessarily, merely that there is some ground to riff on here. I particularly like the presentation as one of the few bits of humor I know where you can make a two year old laugh and you can make a veteran professor laugh, and everyone in between, yet they are all laughing about different things at incredibly different levels of intellectual sophistication. The presentation is truly a humor masterpiece.
Humor masterpiece satirizing standard academic presentations, funny at every level.
@Joel_Mckay Jun 2024 Strongly recommends
on HN thread A long guide to giving a short academic talk (2022)
Or one can quickly learn how to achieve clear presentations by indexing the common errata: "Chicken chicken chicken" (Yoram Bauman) [this video] This should be required viewing for every academic author. =3
Shows common presentation errors; should be required viewing for academics.
@Joel_Mckay Nov 2025 Recommends
on HN thread Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024)
"Still it's amusing how Whitney's style seems to personally offend people" So it was for the lols after all... Notably, a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp is a common assignment for second year CS students. In a production setting, there is little reason to misappropriate resources for such toys. Bud Haggert still teaches smart people something very important about communication with interdisciplinary crowds: [link] Doug Zongker's presentation similarly instructs people how to make better presentations to peers by demonstrating what not to do: [this video] Best of luck =3
Teaches better presentations by demonstrating what not to do.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@feyman_r Apr 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken [pdf]
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Almost like a test from my POV (non-American) ;). From Bing/ChatGPT: The purpose of this paper is not clear from the current web page context, which consists of mostly the word "chicken" repeated in various ways. However, based on web search results, it seems that this paper is a *humorous presentation* by Doug Zongker, a computer scientist from the University of Washington¹. He created this paper to mock the format and style of scientific papers and presentations, and to demonstrate how little content and meaning can be conveyed by using jargon and graphs³. The paper was presented at the AAAS humor session in 2007¹³, and has been viewed online by many people who find it amusing²³. Source: Conversation with Bing, 4/28/2023(1) Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken - isotropic.org. [link] Accessed 4/28/2023. (2) Chicken chicken chicken - YouTube. [this video] Accessed 4/28/2023. (3) Chicken, Chicken, Chicken | The Pioneer Woman | Food Network. [link] Accessed 4/28/2023.
Cited as a source in an AI-generated explanation of the paper.
@jerf Jan 2017 Makes a joke
on HN thread Five-month-old babies know what’s funny
'My son's in college now, and I still haven't forgotten when he was not yet walking, less than a year old, and we sat on the couch cracking each other up every time I said the word "chicken." Who knows why it was funny?' If you'd like, you can try bonding once again over the collegiate-level telling of that joke: [this video]
@acqq Apr 2020 Makes a joke
on HN thread The Relative Weirdness of Birds
The paper about which is written there is: [link] and, to warn anybody expecting more, ends with: "Acknowledgements We thank Big Bird from Sesame Street for comments on the manuscript. Several trained monkeys transcribed videos." Also: "Published Date: April 01, 2020" In short: meh. Doesn't even appear to be funny, especially especially when "covered" on April 15, 2020, for my understanding of what is actually funny: [this video] .
@userbinator May 2021 Makes a joke
on HN thread Enigma: GPT-2 trained on 10K Nature Papers: Can you spot the difference?
Some of the fake ones are hilarious: The chicken genome (the genome of a chicken that is the subject of much chicken-related activity) is now compared to its chicken chicken-to-pecking age: from a genome sequence of chicken egg, only approximately 70% of the chicken genome sequences match the chicken egg genome, which suggests that the chicken may have beenancreatic. (Related: [this video] )
@fghorow Oct 2023 Makes a joke
on HN thread The Shortest Papers Ever Published
Hmm. I'm wondering how the short lengths of these papers might cause them to have lower information-theoretic entropy than the (in)famous "chicken" talk[1]? [1] [this video]
@teddyh Apr 2026 Makes a joke
on HN thread IETF draft-meow-mrrp-00
Disappointingly, this draft does not reference previous important and influential work in this field: < [link] >. (Also available in video format: < [this video] >)

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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