A year or so later, the BBC offered Cleese his own series. He was interested, but he didn’t want to be the show’s star. He preferred to surround himself with a team of Britain’s cleverest young writer-performers. Chapman, Cleese’s writing partner since their days in Cambridge’s Footlights club, was first on board. Cleese also wanted to bring on Palin, but Palin had by now acquired some teammates of his own, with whom he’d been working on a children’s program called Do Not Adjust Your Set. Cleese, who admired the show, was so keen to get Palin that he recruited three of his collaborators too. One was an enthusiastic Welshman named Terry Jones, whom Palin had teamed up with at Oxford. The second was Eric Idle, another Cambridge alum. The third was a louche-looking American named Terry Gilliam, who’d come to London to work as a cartoonist and an illustrator, and had vague aspirations to direct movies.

So the new troupe would consist of six men, broken into three writing units—Cleese-Chapman, Palin-Jones, and Idle, who worked by himself and specialized in songs and monologues—as well as Gilliam, who would be left alone to do his animations. Their show would have an initial run of 13 half-hour episodes; but what was it going to be called? The team flirted with a long list of options—Will Strangler’s Flying Circus, E. L. Moist’s Flying Circus—before they hit on a name that stuck: Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Working up material for the project, Cleese and Chapman took another pass at the car-salesman idea. It had possibilities, Cleese felt, that they had failed to exploit. What if they shifted the action to a pet shop? What if the malfunctioning car became a dead animal? A dog, say. Or a parrot.

The dead-parrot sketch debuted on episode eight of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which aired in Britain on December 7, 1969. The sketch epitomized everything that was striking about the new show: its impatience with the old formal rules, its ability to take good ideas and compress them into diamonds. The car-salesman sketch had been about the absurdity of bad service, but it had attacked that absurdity in a naturalistic way: it started with a plausible situation, and gradually made it sillier. The parrot sketch inverts that approach. It is absurd from the start, but its absurdity represents a compact, dreamlike way of telling the truth. This time the role of the aggrieved customer is taken by Cleese—who plays him not as a straight man but as a Brylcreemed, raincoated weirdo. In the world of Monty Python, even a guy with a valid beef is a lunatic. As for Palin’s salesman, this time his denials of the undeniable have an existential audacity: he is ready to claim, and keep claiming, that the palpably dead parrot is just resting. Cleese, indignantly brandishing the bird’s corpse, is the victim of the ultimate—the archetypal—rip-off; but he remains an Englishman. Nutty as he is, he declines to vault over the desk and punch Palin’s lights out. Language is the only weapon available to him. So his tamped-down rage becomes a torrent of increasingly baroque synonyms for death, which Cleese and Chapman composed with the aid of a thesaurus.