Flash: Monty Python 'Parrot' Sketch Traced To Ancient Greek Joke Book
OK, maybe "flash" was parrot overkill. It is clearly one of those end-of-a-long Friday items, but I am convinced by the press mavens behind a new online joke book, "new" being the absolute least appropriate adjective imaginable, that they are on to something.
Online self-publishing site, yudu.com (get it?,) has just released a new version of a 4th century BC joke book, Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, with over 200 jokes and witticisms ascribed to a pair or Greeks, Hierocles and Philagrius. BTW: I Googled them enough to conclude there actually is an ancient joke book of which this is a new translation.
Anyway, according to the book, which was being hawked with the headline about tracing the roots of the Python’s famous TV skit, the dead parrot sketch, can arguably be traced to the following joke:
"A man goes up to a student dunce (apparently the Greek generic for the butt of jokes) and says, ‘The slave you sold me died.’ ‘By the gods,’ counters the dunce, ‘when he was with me, he never did any such thing!’
Followed by the Greek equivalent of a drum riff and a cymbal crash, both of which were likely used by the ancient Greeks since the date from perhistoric times.
danny commented:
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your feedback. The great thing about the net is we are all free to express our opinions!
No, it is not fake but it is an ebook. The hard copy on Amazon will set you back $42 will take 5 weeks to arrive, will be produced using a small tree and consume a lot of fossil fuel to get it to you. The YUDU book is multimedia which we think is very appropriate as in Ancient Greece these jokes were always performed live.....and as you no doubt realise someone them definitely needs a funny man to tell them to make them even remotely funny.
And yes....the press loved it......and so have the readers all over the world, something that would never have happened if it had remained gathering dust in the back of Amazon's warehouse.
In any case we appreciate the time you have taken to comment and hope you will come to appreciate the power of multimedia thingies (we call them multimedia books)