The provenance of Monty Python's "Dead Parrot" sketch - a joke from 400 A.D.?

"Philogelos: The Laugh Addict" combines ancient humor with cutting-edge technology: William Berg has translated a fourth-century Greek text and has organized the whole thing into an online book with videos featuring stand-up routines of the material. Berg found that a lot of the jokes are still being recycled today. (Writers on "According to Jim" and "Gary Unmarried" are advised to get their copies today!)

In fact, Berg suggests that he may have discovered the first incarnation of the famous Monty Python "Dead Parrot Sketch" (you know the one, where the shopkeeper tries to convince his customer that the parrot isn't really dead even as he's bonking it on the counter), cooked up 1,600 years ago (the phrase "student dunce," used below, was apparently a way of getting around being politically incorrect, used, say, instead of "Pollock" or "Kentuckian"):

"A man goes up to a student dunce and says, 'The slave you sold me died.' 'By the gods,' counters the dunce, 'when he was with me, he never did any such thing!'"

There's a lot more where that came from. P.S.: Here are some free highlights from the book.