Dead Parrot sketch of "Death in Paradise". A joke dated AD 400, recently translated from Greek, shows similarities to the Parrot sketch. It was written by Hierocles and Philagrius and was included in a compilation of 265 jokes titled "Philogelos: The Laugh Addict". In the Greek version, a man complains to a slave-merchant that his new slave has died. The slave-merchant replies, "When he was with me, he never did any such thing!" In Mark Twain's humorous short story "A Nevada Funeral", two characters use a series of euphemisms for death including 'kicked the bucket' and 'departed to that mysterious country from whose
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