Plot
Mr Praline enters the pet shop to register a complaint about the dead Norwegian Blue parrot just as the shopkeeper is preparing to close the establishment for lunch. Despite being told that the bird is deceased and that it had been nailed to its perch, the proprietor insists that it is "pining for the fjords" or simply "stunned". As the exasperated Praline attempts to wake up the parrot, the shopkeeper tries to make the bird move by hitting the cage, and Praline erupts into a rage after banging "Polly Parrot" on the counter. After listing off several metaphors for death ("is no more", "has ceased to be", "bereft of life, it rests in peace") he is told to go to the pet shop run by the shopkeeper's brother in Bolton for a refund, but he is told by the proprietor of that store (who is really the shopkeeper, save for a fake moustache) that he is in Ipswich. Upon going to the train station to complain, Praline is told by the station attendant (Terry Jones) that he is in Bolton, and he returns to the pet shop to confront the shopkeeper for deceiving him. Adding to the absurdity of it all is the fact that most parrots live in tropical climates, and none are native to Norway. Just as the dialogue is getting "too silly", Graham Chapman's no-nonsense colonel bursts in and orders the sketch to be stopped.
Read more about this topic: Dead Parrot Sketch
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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