I was thinking today about Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch.
You know the one — the one where John Cleese, as the furious customer, tries to return a clearly deceased parrot to a pet shop run by an unflappable Michael Palin.
Look, my lad, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.
No no he’s not dead, he’s, he’s restin’! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn’it, ay? Beautiful plumage!
Oh, just watch it!
I’ve seen it countless times and it still cracks me up. Not just because of the absurd repetition, but because it’s one of the purest examples of denial ever put on film. The shopkeeper’s commitment to the lie — his desperate insistence that the parrot is merely “pining for the fjords” — is so perfect that it transcends comedy. It becomes something close to philosophy.
That, of course, is what makes it timeless. We’re all Michael Palin sometimes. We all have our dead parrots; things that have stopped breathing long ago, but that we keep insisting are merely “stunned.”
For some people, that parrot might be a relationship. For others, a career path. For a few brave souls, it might even be an ideology. I’ve known plenty of people who continue to prop up the cage and whistle cheerfully, pretending everything’s fine, when deep down they know there’s nothing inside but a stiff bird.
The plumage don’t enter into it. It’s stone dead.
And yet, I understand it. We’re wired for narrative coherence; we want our stories to make sense, and it’s hard to admit when a chapter has closed. So we start adding footnotes: It’s just resting, it’ll get better, once the kids are older, once the market turns around. Those are just the modern equivalents of “beautiful plumage.”
I sometimes catch myself doing it too, propping up something that should probably be buried. A half-written essay I keep swearing I’ll finish.[1] A project that’s long stopped making sense. Even the notion that HIVE might still have a bright future. You have voted for the return proposal, right? (See here)
But I digress.
That parrot is definitely deceased, and when I purchased it not ‘alf an hour ago, you assured me that its total lack of movement was due to it bein’ tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk.
There’s a kind of spiritual discipline in learning to recognize when the parrot has gone stiff. I think about the Zen concept of mu, the un-answer. In a koan, when a monk asks whether a dog has Buddha-nature, Joshu replies simply, “Mu.” Not yes, not no, just un-ask the question. The parrot sketch, in a way, is the Western version of that. Cleese keeps demanding confirmation that the bird is alive. Palin keeps inventing new ways to say “Mu” without ever admitting death.
(After taking it out of the cage, thumping its head on the counter, throwing it up in the air, and watching it plummet to the floor.) Now that’s what I call a dead parrot.
No, no…..No, ’e’s stunned!
Maybe that’s the real joke. The sketch is hilarious because we all know what Cleese should do: stop talking and walk away. But he can’t. He’s caught in the loop of needing an answer. So he rants and raves, in a way that only John Cleese can do, and the audience laughs because they recognize themselves.
If I were less self-aware, I’d say this was the perfect metaphor for social media. But let’s not go there.
Oh, who am I kidding? Let’s go there.
Think about your favorite social platform — Twitter (or what’s left of it), Facebook, Reddit, etc. How many of us are still shaking the cage, trying to make them move? “Look! They are useful!” Instagram might be the only one free of bots arguing with each other and still primarily human. But than again, is a stream full of food photos really all that better than arguing bots?
Meanwhile, the bird is stone cold, the beak stiff as a hashtag.
Monty Python understood something that tech CEOs and motivational speakers never will: you can’t resuscitate absurdity. The moment you try to reason with nonsense, you’re already halfway to joining it. That’s why the sketch ends not with acceptance but escalation. The customer finally explodes in a tirade of synonyms for death —
’E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ’e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ’im to the perch ’e’d be pushing up the daisies!
’Is metabolic processes are now ’istory! ’E’s off the twig!
’E’s kicked the bucket, ’e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!!
THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!
— because sometimes that’s what closure looks like: shouting the truth into the void until it echoes back at you.
And then you leave the shop.
That, in itself, is oddly hopeful. There’s freedom in declaring something dead. Once you’ve buried the parrot, you can stop buying birdseed. You can stop pretending. You can even go get a hamster, if that’s what life calls for next. Hamsters are nice. At least until they escape their cage and somehow end up dead in the dryer. I swear every single one of the hamsters we had when I was a kid ended up that way.
But I digress.
Or maybe you sit quietly, listen to the emptiness, and realize you never needed the bird in the first place.
The irony, of course, is that we’re talking about a comedy sketch. Yet, like much of Python’s work, it spirals into a kind of existential truth. Humor has always been philosophy’s unruly cousin — less serious, but sometimes more accurate. The laugh gets past your defenses faster than the lecture ever could. There is a reason some of the best political news these days comes from comedians.
Oh, but we really won’t go there! Honest this time.
When I was a teenager, I thought the Dead Parrot sketch was just silly British absurdism. Now I think it’s one of the wisest commentaries on human nature ever written. We cling to the things we can’t admit have ended. We decorate them, polish them, call them “vintage.” We post nostalgic tributes to their “beautiful plumage.” And all the while, the truth is lying there in the cage, silent but unmistakable.
Maybe the lesson isn’t to stop loving the past—but to stop trying to make it squawk again.
There, he moved!
No, he didn’t, that was you hitting the cage!
So here’s to the parrots we’ve buried, the jobs we’ve left, the platforms we’ve outgrown, and the ideas we’ve finally let rest. They had beautiful plumage, every one of them. But sometimes, the kindest thing you can do is close the lid and walk away humming the theme from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
-
You don’t want to see my drafts folder on my computer. It’s scary. ↩
❦
 |
David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Bluesky. |
I have a similar drafts folder, mate. :)
I also love this sketch, and the way you make this big, profound thing so accessible through this writing made it a joy to read.
On the topic of parrots, you need to read "The Great Silence" by Ted Chiang. It's a short story, and here it is:
http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/supercommunity/article_1087.pdf
Three pages.
Something so funny yet somehow so very profound.
I absolutely love this post. I loved that sketch, it's brilliant absurdism. There's a lot of MP clips I forward people when a conversation calls for it. But the parallel here with - well, let's just say our tendency to flog a dead horse aka parrot is perfect.
!LADY !PIZZA
!LADY !PIZZA
View or trade
LOHtokens.@geneeverett, you successfully shared 0.1000 LOH with @dbooster and you earned 0.1000 LOH as tips. (8/13 calls)
Use !LADY command to share LOH! More details available in this post.
$PIZZA slices delivered:
geneeverett tipped dbooster
@geneeverett(10/20) tipped @riverflows
Come get MOONed!
Awesome read.
There could also be a new angle to it. Sometimes, a lie repeatedly told confuses you. You no longer call it a lie outrightly, but look for ways to disprove it. Isn't it how MSM works nowadays?
I digress.
I've never been a fan of IG and FB. Perhaps it's co I'm not a fan of pictures. I'm kinda addicted to x, cos it's a platform to learn how not to live one's life.