Rubber Chicken Crossing the Road: Poultry Humor from Geoffrey Chaucer to Will Arnett

According to the Bluth (and Fünke) families, chickens make a wide and beautiful variety of noises. While these moves seem like an interpretive free-for-all, Buster is very authoritative in his assertion that "Chickens DON'T clap!"

Of course Geoffrey Chaucer knew the value of a good chicken-tale. The Nun's Priest's Tale outlines the story of Chanticleer the rooster, whose coral-red comb, peerless crowing and brood of beautiful hens make him the perfect ill-fated protagonist. After a bad dream, in which he is eaten by a fox, Chanticleer has a Cato-quoting argument with his wife Pertelote, in which she convinces him it was not a prophecy. Interpreting the proverb "Mulier est hominis confusio" (woman is man's ruin) as "woman is man's joy and all his bliss," poor Chanticleer struts into the yard and is snatched up by a fox. He outsmarts the fox just in time, and returns a sadder, wiser (and more misogynistic) rooster.  

This children's fable stars a whole host of witless fowl, including Chicken Little, Henny Penny, Turkey Lurkey, Goosey Loosey and Ducky Luckey. After an acorn falls on poor Chicken Little's head, she is thrown into an existential crisis, and runs around shouting, "The sky is falling!" and dizzying all her friends into panic mode. What could have been a Saturday Night Live satire on fundamentalism and flock-mentality was instead made into a mediocre Disney film starring Zack Braff.

It's the age-old question. They both have speech impediments, bad tempers and webbed feet, but the similarities end there. Like his bunny counterpart, Daffy gets laughs from his trickster's knack for working the system and outsmarting earnest good guys like Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig. Of course, a certain carrot-chewing, wise-cracking wabbit always outsmarts him, prompting a lisped, "You're Dethpicable!" But we laugh at Donald instead of with him: he's a bumbling foil to the square, good-tempered Mickey Mouse, and when his "uppance" inevitably comes, we understand because we've been there too.

All through the '90s, Chandler was famous for his chick problems, and not just the female kind. Joey and Chandler's poultry became icons of illegal urban pet-dom when the duo brought a baby chick and orphaned duck into their Manhattan apartment.

Combine Aardman Animations (of Wallace and Gromit fame), stop-motion, and a group of chickens trying to escape a destiny in gravy-pies, and you've got a hit movie.