What You’ll Actually Learn at the Rubber Chicken Museum

When you walk into Archie McPhee, you’re already feeling pretty silly. The novelty shop occupies a bright red-and-yellow storefront in Wallingford, and inside you’ll find whoopee cushions, corn-shaped air fresheners, possum-flavored candy, that sort of thing. Then you walk to the back where there’s a velvet rope in front of a wall full of rubber chickens, and you feel even sillier. Welcome to the Rubber Chicken Museum.

A visit to the museum takes about five or 10 minutes, depending on how much you want to learn about rubber chickens. And there is actually a lot to learn. Dead chickens may have been used in comedy dating way back to the court jester era — they are sort of funny — and Steve Martin used rubber chickens as props in his avant-garde comedy act in the 1970s. Johnny Carson had one on his desk, Weird Al Yankovic deployed one in the music video for “Eat It,” and there was even a rubber chicken floating around the MSNBC newsroom for a while. (That last chicken is in the museum, maybe its most famous artifact.) You can take in this history and see a lot of rubber chickens, many of them designed by Archie McPhee.

To be clear, the museum is funny. Some of the exhibits, like the “world’s second-smallest rubber chicken,” are jokes. Arguably, the whole museum is a joke, although the thing is delivered with such a straight face that it's more strange than laugh-out-loud funny. According to an old Seattle Times article, the Archie McPhee employee who devised it, Shana Danger, “was inspired by old-fashioned cabinets of curiosities she saw while traveling in Europe,” and it is both amusing and strange, an oddity. And honestly, we could use more oddities in Seattle.