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",
Broad-billed parrot sexes may have had different colours, which would explain some of the discrepancies in old descriptions. Johannes Pretorius (on Mautirius from 1666 to 1669) kept various now-extinct Mauritian birds in captivity, and described the behaviour of the broad-billed parrot as follows: Though the broad-billed parrot may have fed on the ground and been a weak flier, its tarsometatarsus was short and stout, implying some arboreal characteristics. The Newton brothers and many authors after them inferred that it was flightless, due to the apparent short wings and large size shown in the 1601 "Gelderland" sketch. According to Hume, the underlying pencil