The Rubber Chicken

To bring a little joy to every Geo-Cacher.

~~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.

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.[1] 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.[citation needed] [2] 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.

A rubber chicken was customarily kept behind Johnny Carson's desk on NBC's "The Tonight Show" as a comedic talisman as it was believed that "A rubber chicken always gets a laugh."

Horror host Svengoolie winds up getting rubber chickens thrown at him for bad jokes before the featured film is shown and after to wrap up the show.