This clip is from the British television show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In the “Dead Parrot Sketch,” John Cleese goes to the pet store to complain to Michael Palin that the parrot he has purchased is dead. Palin uses story telling to try and convince Cleese that the parrot is perfectly alright. Cleese uses Narrative Rationality of the Narrative Paradigm Theory to decide whether or not to believe Palin’s story.
The two aspects of narrative rationality are coherence and fidelity. Coherence refers to the consistency of a story. One type of coherence, or lack there of, displayed in the Dead Parrot Sketch is structural coherence, or the way a story flows. Palin’s story is choppy and inconsistent, giving Cleese reason not to believe him. Palin jumps back and forth between subjects, often bringing in irrelevant information, like the “lovely plumage” of the parrot. His explanation of the immobile parrot changes as time goes by. First he says that it’s resting, but later he claims it is stunned. He moves one to say it’s pining for the fields. Cleese chooses not to believe him because of the lack of structural coherence in Palin’s obviously improvised and constantly changing story.
Material coherence has to do with information learned in other stories about the same subject. Cleese reminds Palin that when he bought the parrot, Palin assured him that is was not moving because it was "tired and shagged out." Cleese has been told multiple stories involving the parrot, none of which check out with each other. This leads Cleese to believe Palin even less.
Fidelity is the truthfulness and reliability of a story. Palin is severely lacking in fidelity, mostly because his story is that the parrot is alive, while it is dead in Cleese’s hands. There is physical evidence that contradicts his facts. Palin claims that the parrot is sleeping, but Cleese proves him wrong by unsuccessfully trying to wake it up, destroying any fidelity Palin has in his argument.
5 comments:
The "Dead" Parrot sketch from the comedy television show Monty Python's Flying Circus is an absurdly funny and dramatic interpretation of Walter Fisher's Narrative Paradigm Theory.
Although this clip is obviously exaggerated, it does accurately capture the essence and importance of narrative rationality. Palin's story obviously lacks all kinds of coherence and fidelity. In fact, there is no part of the story that makes any sense at all.
Palin's firm assertions that the parrot was still alive blatantly contradicted fidelity and material coherence. In fact, what he was saying couldn't be less true, which certainly gave Cleese reason to question his character (characterological coherence). This demonstrates the importance of a storyteller to retain all the elements of narrative rationality, or else listeners will be less inclined to believe any of the aspects of the story.
Had Palin presented a better constructed and believable story, Cleese may have aligned his own personal values or good reasons with that of the circumstances for why the parrot is now dead.
It's an interesting piece.
Thank Todd for adding the characterological coherence.
This outrageous portrayal of the Narrative Paradigm is a good example of a the audience's assessment of a story, or use of good reasons. The lack of any type of coherence, as explained by Todd, makes for a truly unbelievable story. Cleese used his reasoning to decipher Palin's story. Palin made up a poor excuse for a story, trying anything possible to make Cleese keep the bird. Cleese knew that this story did not line up with the physical evidence, nor with any rational explanations from prior experience. Cleese knew that birds don't act dead when they are tired from flying around all day, so the story lacked fidelity from the beginning. The coherence of the story did not help Palin either because it was choppy (structural), he was unbelievable (characterological), and it made no sense with any other story (material). Thus, this clip shows a great example of a poorly constructed story that had no fidelity or coherence, making it unbelievable.
I never noticed how much of the Narrative Paradigm Theory was actually in Monty Python. I mean one of the first line of the sketch is "Hello miss." to which the other man says "What do you mean miss?" To which the first man say "Oh sorry, I have a cold."
The statement lacks any structural because there is no way that a cold could cause someone to confuse a person's gender. This lack of fidelity is further proven by the fact that for the rest of the sketch, John Cleese never sneezes or coughs or does anything resembling a person with a cold.
This clip exemplifies the extreme lack of coherence and/or fidelity in a story. Palin's excuses for why the bird is dead keep changing showing an utter lack of structural coherence. But this is a comedy sketch and even through all the lies told to him, Cleese, in the end still believes that taking the dead parrot to the 'brother's' store would fix his situation. Had the shopkeep not been so insistent on the fact that the parrot was indeed alive and gave more reasonable answers, perhaps Cleese's character would have been more inclined to believe him. A story with more structural coherence and fidelity would have won Cleese over. But, then again, it was a comedy sketch.
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