The earliest extant joke book is the "Philogelos" (Greek for "The Laughter-Lover"), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the "grammatikos"", just "Hierokles", or, in the "Suda", "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the "Philogelos" may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The "Philogelos" even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch".