[1920] in Humor
HUOR: The Magician and the Parrot
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Fri Feb 28 15:46:40 1997
From: <abennett@MIT.EDU>
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 1997 15:33:45 EST
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 23:00:32 -0800
From: Connie Kleinjans <connie@interserve.com>
From: jeff.snyder@octel.com
It's clean, it's cute, it works.
A magician works on a small cruise ship. He's been doing his
routines every night for a year or two, and the audiences love him.
Since it's a different crowd every few days, he doesn't have to
worry too much about new tricks.
However, there's this parrot who has sat in the back row and
watched him night after night, year after year. Eventually the
parrot figured out how the tricks worked, and started giving them
away for the audience. For example, every time the magician made a
bouquet of flowers disappear, the parrot squawked "Behind his back!
Behind his back!"
Understandably, this annoyed the magician -- but since the parrot
belonged to the Captian, his options were limited.
One day, the ship sprang a leak and sank. The magician managed to
swim to a nearby plank of wood -- and on the other end of this
plank sat the parrot. For three days they floated silently,
staring at each other without speaking a word. Finally, on the
morning of the fourth day, the parrot looked at the magician and
asked: "OK, I give up. Where did you hide the ship?"
