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parrot! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace!" |
by D. Trull
Enigma Editor
dtrull@parascope.com
And now for something completely... familiar?
A customer walks into a pet shop and wishes to register a complaint. There's a problem with a parrot the unfortunate soul recently purchased from this very boutique. What's wrong with it? It's dead, that's what's wrong with it.
Unconvinced, the shopkeeper argues that the bird is only resting. Its lack of movement is due to it being tired and shagged out after a long squawk.
But no, the customer argues: it's passed on! This parrot is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late parrot! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible!
This is an ex-parrot!
Now, you might recall the above exchange as a classic scene from Monty Python's Flying Circus, series #1, episode #8 ("Full Frontal Nudity"), December 1969. The immortal skit featured John Cleese as Mr. Praline, the hapless customer; Michael Palin as the shifty shopkeeper; and the Norwegian Blue, a beautiful bird with lovely plumage.
But believe it or not, such a scenario also unfolded in a very nonfictional Swedish pet shop in 1996. Life imitates sketch, and the parallels are chillingly silly.
An unnamed woman paid about $650 for a parrot from a shop in Malmo, Sweden. Unlike the Python parrot, this bird was at least alive when she first took it home. After a few days, though, its behavior became erratic and listless. Being from the same geographic region as the Norwegian Blue, perhaps it too was pining for the fjords. The woman's bird began to lose its balance and fell off its perch. Apparently her shopkeeper had not considered nailing it there.
The owner took her parrot to a veterinarian's office, where it soon died. After burying it, she returned to the pet shop to complain about its rapid expiration. But because she brought no body to present as proof, the shop owner tried to weasel his way out of a refund, steadfastly insisting -- and this is the good part! -- that the parrot may have just been sleeping.
All in all, this unlikely chain of events forms a staggeringly complete realization of the Dead Parrot Sketch, that quintessential Monty Python achievement, which stands alongside the Lumberjack Song and the Ministry of Silly Walks as the team's most brilliant work. In light of the Swedish incident, it's interesting to note that the inspiration for the sketch grew from a real-life customer service nightmare that one of its performers once had to endure.
"I had told John about my experiences with the local garage guy who had sold me my car," Michael Palin once told an interviewer. "He was one of those people who could never accept that anything had gone wrong. ... He had an answer for everything. He would never, ever accept any blame for anything at all. I'd say, 'Well, the door came off while I was doing 50 mph,' and he'd say, 'Well, they do, don't they?'"
Cleese and Palin worked this concept into a sketch for a non-Python program, and Cleese later rewrote it with Graham Chapman, who came up with the essential element of substituting a dead parrot for a defective automobile. The rest is history.
And now history has repeated itself. The Pythons took an actual situation, amplified its strangeness by several degrees of magnitude, transformed it into a world-recognized touchstone of surrealist comedy, and the warped end result has wound its way full circle back into the fabric of reality, three decades later. Now, if that's not a bona-fide paranormal phenomenon, I don't know what the hell is.
Of course, the Swedish parrot story hasn't played out exactly like its Python precedent. Whereas the Dead Parrot Sketch concluded with Chapman in his Army Colonel uniform calling the sketch to a halt on the grounds that it had become too silly, the Swedish woman is arranging an even more preposterous climax: she's slapping her pet shop with a lawsuit. It's difficult to imagine what courtroom proceedings a dead parrot trial might involve, but the defense probably isn't expecting the Spanish Inquisition.
(Cue jarring chord.)
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise... surprise and fear... fear and surprise... our two weapons are fear and surprise... and ruthless efficiency. Our three weapons --
(Editor's note: Right, that'll be enough of that. This Fortean Slip has gotten far too silly. No, the whole premise is silly, and it's very badly written. Let's have some good, proper stories about ghosts and great scary monsters and such. Right then, off you go.)
Sources: CNN; The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus: All the Words, Volume 1, Chapman, Cleese, Gilliam, Idle, Jones and Palin; The First 200 Years of Monty Python, Kim "Howard" Johnson.
(c) Copyright 1997 ParaScope, Inc.
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