Slashdot Mirror
Dead Parrot Sketch Is 1,600 Years Old
laejoh writes "Monty Python's 'Dead Parrot sketch' — which featured John Cleese — is some 1,600 years old.
A classic scholar has proved the point, by unearthing a Greek version of the world-famous piece.
A comedy duo called Hierocles and Philagrius told the original version, only rather than a parrot they used a slave.
It concerns a man who complains to his friend that he was sold a slave who dies in his service.
His companion replies: 'When he was with me, he never did any such thing!'
The joke was discovered in a collection of 265 jokes called Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, which dates from the fourth century AD.
Hierocles had gone to meet his maker, and Philagrius had certainly ceased to be, long before John Cleese and Michael Palin reinvented the yarn in 1969."
As a Classics major as an undergrad, I'm always happy to see these kind of stories. There was some wicked humour in the ancient world that is still hilarious today, from the political jibes in the plays of Aristophanes to the obscenities of Petronius' Satyricon. It's a pity that most people would never think about reading them, because one tends to assume that old literary works are dry and serious.
That's what I thought too, until I read Suetonius' Twelve Caesars... The amount of trash in it makes it particularly entertaining.
The Raven
When I was much younger I was turned on to the classics after reading Lysistrata. Quick synopsis from Wikipedia:
Led by the title character, Lysistrata, the story's female characters barricade the public funds building and withhold sex from their husbands to end the Peloponnesian War and secure peace.
The euphemisms and innuendo are killer, especially to a young teen :)
Yes, Euripides' Electra is one of the funniest plays in all existence simply for the recognition scene. Everyone should read the Oresteia and then read Euripides. Heck, that scene is hilarious even if you haven't read the Oresteia. Euripides mercilessly parodies a variety of literary conceits which are still used today. It is almost like Euripides had access to TVTropes.com
Ovid had a humorous poem about a dead parrot long before this play was ever written, complete with the long-winded and repetitive description of exactly how dead the parrot is which characterizes Monty Python's sketch.
This was itself a parody of a poem by Catullus, lamenting the death of his lover's "sparrow." The quotes are there for a reason; it's the term he used, but modern poets would probably have used a more, err, feline term to catch the nuance, if you know what I mean (wink and a nudge, say no more, say no more).
Monty Python was made up of some extremely erudite people; even Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film actually corresponds to someone from Arthurian legend (and bonus points if you can tell me who). No doubt they drew inspiration from the Ovid poem too, among others, and is there really any problem with that? It's friggin funny.
Monty Python is treated as more absurdist than they really were by American audiences. A lot of the objects of their humor were aspects of British life, politics and culture that would be recognizable to viewers in the UK, particularly at the time. Which is why British comedy moved on decades ago (The League of Gentlemen, Little Britain, The Catherine Tate Show, and the brilliant That Mitchell and Webb Look.)
When an American geeks constantly recycle the same handful of Monty Python routines, it's depressing. It's humor-by-algorithm: if it was funny once, the memory of the experience of that humor displaces the actual spontaneity and discovery of new sources of humor in a kind of compulsive repetition, which I think is meant more to reassure geeks than to amuse them.
Yes, it would -- because the funny part of the Monty Python sketch is that it's basically about trying too hard.
The shopkeeper is trying to convince the patron that everything is all right, that he doesn't need to make a fuss. He is a bit of a cheat in that he sold a dead parrot as a live one, but likewise the customer is a bit of a fool for buying it. But by the middle of the sketch it is clear that the shopkeeper is merely trying much too hard to recuperate a failing social situation: the patron is not going to be fooled again, and the shopkeeper's desperate, inventive, and doomed attempts to maintain a polite and friendly atmosphere, while continuing to insist that nothing is wrong (that the parrot is alive) are much of the humor.
For the shopkeeper to admit that the parrot is dead, as in the Greek joke, would be to spoil the scene.
(I get the sense that many Python fans think the sketch is about the patron's widely-quoted rant. I disagree.)
A lot of Monty Python is like that: the humor is in how a perfectly ordinary and unfunny event becomes an outrageous farce after something goes very wrong, because someone in the situation simply refuses to admit that anything is out of the ordinary. It's all about how pretending that everything is okay makes you into a total buffoon.