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."

Comments

Re:Classics, not just stuffy rhetoric or dull hist

[elrous0]

That's because the only people you have known from that earlier time were all older and humorless by the time you met them. Comedy has been around since the the dawn of civilization, when Ugg the caveman first discovered comedy after eliciting laughs with an accidental fart joke.

Re:Classics, not just stuffy rhetoric or dull hist

[Rude Turnip]

Jesus had one joke in the bible..."Peter, you are the rock upon which my church will be built." Peter=petros=rock. HAHA Oh that Jesus always cracks me up!

old joke

[Dr. Tom]

I think the old joke should have been, "Hey, that slave you sold me is dead!" (not died in service; that's different, and less of a joke).