Dead Parrot Sketch Is 1,600 Years Old 276
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."
Manditory Link (Score:5, Informative)
THIS.... is an Ex-Parrot!!
Better link... (Score:5, Informative)
Patented humor (Score:2, Informative)
It's the same sketch, only there is no parrot but a slave, the slave is not dead in the shop and consequently not nailed to the perch. But otherwise, really the same thing.
Re:so that's what killed it (Score:5, Informative)
And you can read it (well, watch Jim Bowen perform them), here: http://publishing.yudu.com/Library/Au7bv/PhilogelosTheLaughAd/resources/index.htm [yudu.com]
Re:Never the same again (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithras#Mithraism_and_Christianity
Re:Classics, not just stuffy rhetoric or dull hist (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Classics, not just stuffy rhetoric or dull hist (Score:2, Informative)
Generally, browse the Project Gutenberg without any feelings of guilt or worries of lawlessness ;)
Re:so that's what killed it (Score:4, Informative)
Since neither this article nor any other report I can find actually gives the reference for the joke, those wanting to look at critical editions can find it under Philogelos 18. Here's my literal translation:
Someone met an academic and said, "The slave you sold me died." "By the gods!" he said. "When he was at my place he didn't do anything like that."
I can't reproduce here the text for those who can read ancient Greek, as Slashdot won't allow non-Roman alphabets. Here's a transliterated form, though (minus the diacritics):
scholastikôi tis apantêsas eipen: ho doulos, hon epôlêas moi, apethane. ma tous theous, ephê, par' emoi hote ên, toiouton ouden epoiêsen.
I don't understand why the article talks as though the joke has just been discovered. There have been at least three critical editions in the last 50 years, and a few translations.
Re:Not the same joke at all (Score:2, Informative)
no, it's the same joke. The differences are minor and the humor is the same.
Oh, and MP disliked ending. The Parrot sketch is full of punch lines.
Much like the "Whose on first" Sketch the Abbot and Costello made famous.
Re:Classics, not just stuffy rhetoric or dull hist (Score:3, Informative)
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.
He was eaten by a dinosaur. Come on, don't you know your world history?
BBC made the same mistake (Score:4, Informative)
These two sketches are not related at all, IMO, let alone "the same joke."
To be fair, the BBC made the same mistake [bbc.co.uk], and my reaction when I saw it on the Beeb's site was the same as yours. The big difference is that on slashdot, you can post a correction. It'll get buried in hundreds of weak attempts at humor, and nobody will ever see it, but at least it's there. The Beeb doesn't really have a place for this sort of bad-analogy-correction. Mistaken facts, they'll correct (which is one way they're superior to Slashdot--the fact that they actually have functioning editors is another), but I wouldn't expect to see any corrections for a more abstract error of this type.