Rubber chicken

A rubber chicken is a prop used in comedy. The phrase is also used as a description for food served at speeches, conventions, and other large meetings, and as a metaphor for speechmaking.

A rubber chicken is an imitation plucked fowl made in a latex injection mold. Popular sight gags and slapstick comedy props, rubber chickens are sometimes used by comics as a mock weapon. They are also sometimes used by jugglers in place of clubs, and (in extremely rare cases) as musical instruments in place of French horns.

The origin of the rubber chicken is obscure, but is possibly based on the use of pig bladders, which were inflated, attached to a stick and used as props or mock-weapons by jesters in the days before the development of plastic and latex. Chicken corpses were readily available; therefore jesters could employ them as variations of slapsticks.

One account attributes the first use of a prop chicken to John Holmberg, the Swedish black-faced clown of the early 1900s. Holmberg would perform with his pockets full of fake food to mock the gluttony reportedly prevalent among the upper classes at the time. A claim that the symbol originated during the French Revolution with soldiers hanging a chicken from their muskets for luck is printed on the tag of rubber chickens manufactured by Archie McPhee.

A Discordian pseudo-secret society, The International Rubber Chicken Society, formed in New Fairfield, Connecticut, uses the emblem of the rubber chicken as a sight-gag with the initials "R.C." to suggest a link with the Rose Cross (also "R.C.") of Rosicrucianism.Andrés Bustamante also featured rubber chickens during his shows in the 1990s.

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