A 1600-year-old joke

This is David writing once more...

Richard and I both liked Monty Python.

One of Richard's most-oft quotes (as it is for most Python fans) would be hauled out for any appropriate (and often, inappropriate) occasion:


"He's not pining! He's passed on! This Richard is no more!
He has ceased to be! He's expired and gone to meet his maker!

He's a stiff! Bereft of life, he rests in peace!
If you hadn't nailed him to the wheelchair he'd be pushing up the daisies!
His metabolic processes are now history! He's off the twig!
He's kicked the bucket, he's shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!!

THIS IS AN EX-RICHARD!!"

'Dead Parrot Sketch', Monty Python, 1969 (modified)


I don't know if Richard knew this, but the concept behind the skit (that a dissatisfied customer is returning a parrot to the pet store on the basis that it was dead when he bought it, but the storekeeper keeps making excuses for the parrot's lack of response) goes back as far as 400 AD, documented by Hierocles and Philagrius in a compilation of jokes titles "Philogelos: The Laugh Addict".

In this Greek version, a man complains to a slave-merchant that this new slave had just died.  The merchant replies, "When he was with me, he never did any such thing!"

I think this is therefore, very fitting to apply to Richard's life - he loved humour and history, and this combination suits him very nicely.
See https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3454319/Dead-Parrot-sketch-is-1600-years-old.html

This information relates to a 2004 BBC poll on comedy sketches, where the Python Parrot Sketch took more than double the next highest number of votes as the Number One best sketch.

The Python's "Four Yorkshiremen" was #2 ('you had a house?? Luxury...  when I was a lad of 3, I'd have to get up in the middle of the night, lick the road clean around the garbage bin where 12 of us lived, scrounge for food for my 27 siblings, work 19 hours at the mill for tuppence a month, then Dad would thrash us to death before bed.  I'd have given my left arm to live in a house..."   "Well, by 'house' I meant the cardboard box we lived in - it were a house to US!"), etc...
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1by0-nkKOTs

And then, perhaps fittingly, #3 was the Little Britain characters Lou and Andy (Andy was disabled & in a wheelchair).  Everytime Lou went to some extreme to make accessible arrangements for a hotel or access to a movie theater or something, Lou, in the background, would just stand up, walk around & do some stuff, like go for a swim in the pool - or just pee into it - before returning to the chair as Lou turned around to further assist him.
See https://youtu.be/rxFyzbiIVMI

I felt like a Lou more than once while Richard and I were travelling...  :)