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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."
In Ostrogothic Russian Steppes, joke reads you!
The party's over
One Dr. to another: "Hey, this graduate student you sent me is an idiot!"
Reply: "No, no, he's an idiot savant."
O: "Idiot savant? He doesn't know any math, and he can barely tie his shoelaces!"
R: "Yes, but he's an expert an something."
O: "What would that be then?"
R: "Well, I dunno, but I'm sure he's a total genius at something.
You just need to find out what it is."
O: "He's not a genius, he's a flippin' loon! He thinks Europe has a President!
He thinks lites are lit by little golden fairies."
R: "Well, he's probably a musician then. Have you tried him in front of the keyboard?
Graduate students really love that."
O: "This is a molecular biology lab! Well, I guess I could get him to interpret A, C, G, and T as C, G, A, and b-flat. But look, the point is, I needed somebody with technical skills! This graduate student is a complete imbecile who knows nothing useful whatsoever!"
R: "Naw, he's just hungry. Give him a soda and some donuts and he'll be off proposing hypotheses all day long."
O: "You're a loony. Did you go to the same undergraduate school he did? Can you read? No wait, don't answer that, I don't care."
etc.