Dead Parrot sketch appearance on "The Muppet Show", Cleese appears as a pirate attempting to take over a spaceship during a "Pigs In Space" sketch. At the end of the sketch, he demands of the smart-mouthed talking parrot on his shoulder, "Do you want to be an ex-parrot?" In 1989's "The Secret Policeman's Biggest Ball", a benefit for Amnesty International, the sketch opens similarly, but ends very differently: In a 1997 "Saturday Night Live" performance of the sketch, Cleese added a line to the rant: "Its metabolic processes are a matter of interest only to historians!" In an interview on NPR's "Fresh Air",
Friedrich Parrot Friedrich Parrot Johann Jacob Friedrich Wilhelm Parrot (25 October 179115 January 1841) was a Baltic German naturalist, explorer, and mountaineer, who lived and worked in Dorpat (today Tartu, Estonia) in what was then the Governorate of Livonia of the Russian Empire. A pioneer of Russian and Estonian scientific mountaineering, he is best known for leading the first expedition to the summit of Mount Ararat in recorded history. Born in Karlsruhe, in the Margraviate of Baden, Parrot was the son of Georg Friedrich Parrot, the first rector of the University of Dorpat (today the University of Tartu) and a close friend