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",
Night parrot its own genus, as data on the night parrot was so limited. A 1994 molecular study using the cytochrome b of several parrot species confirmed the close relationship of the taxa and consensus for its placement in "Pezoporus". It also revealed that the kakapo was not closely related to "Pezoporus". Analysis of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences in a 2011 study showed that the night parrot most likely diverged from the ancestor of the eastern and western ground parrots around 3.3 million years ago. Alternate common names include porcupine parrot, nocturnal ground parakeet, midnight cockatoo, solitaire, spinifex parrot and night