Comedy
A rubber chicken is a replica of a completely plucked but otherwise complete barnyard fowl made from a latex injection mold. A popular sight gag and slapstick comedy prop, rubber chickens are sometimes used by comics as a mock weapon. They are also sometimes used by jugglers in place of clubs. The origin of the rubber chicken is obscure, but is likely a natural change of the use of pig bladders. In the days before the development of plastic and latex, bladders were inflated and attached to a stick. They were used as props by jesters and minstrels for the same comic effects as the modern rubber chicken.
One account attributes the use of a prop chicken to John Holmberg, the Swedish black-faced clown of the early 1900s. At that time, gluttony was fashionable and considered a sign of affluence, and Holmberg would perform with his pockets full of fake food to make fun of the upper classes.
Another likely apocryphal account, which is printed on the tag of rubber chickens manufactured by Archie McPhee, claims that the symbol originated during the French Revolution with soldiers hanging a chicken from their muskets for luck. The apocryphal history of the rubber chicken as used by revolutionaries led a Discordian group, The International Rubber Chicken Society, formed in New Fairfield, Connecticut, to use the emblem of the rubber chicken. The International Rubber Chicken Society's occult symbolism may also have led the pseudo-secret society to use the rubber chicken (a sight-gag with the initials "R.C.") to suggest a link between them, Discordian occult practices, and the Rosey Cross ("R.C.") of Rosicrucianism. Monty Python's Flying Circus featured a recurring bit having a raw chicken-carrying knight who hits people when they begin to ramble. Andrés Bustamante also featured rubber chickens during his shows in the 1990s.
A rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle is a gag object found in LucasArts' Monkey Island franchise games. It is also used as a rating system in the TV show Good Game and Good Game-SP.
Read more about this topic: Rubber Chicken
Famous quotes containing the word comedy:
“The comedy of hollow sounds derives
From truth and not from satire on our lives.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The difference between tragedy and comedy is the difference between experience and intuition. In the experience we strive against every condition of our animal life: against death, against the frustration of ambition, against the instability of human love. In the intuition we trust the arduous eccentricities we’re born to, and see the oddness of a creature who has never got acclimatized to being created.”
—Christopher Fry (b. 1907)