Comedians
and other entertainers lay an egg when their acts fail, but the phrase
originated in the sports world, not in show business. Stranger still, the
expression comes from the sport of cricket, England's national game.
Duck's egg was British slang for "no score" in cricket for many years, and
in about 1860 the expression achieved a duck's egg was used to describe a
team that hadn"t scored and had only large oval zeroes shaped like duck's
eggs on the scoreboard. Ten years later the phrase became more expressive
as laid a goose egg. In baseball the expression for zero soon became just
goose eggs, and it still is, but early vaudevillians adopted the
expression and changed it to laid an egg.