“Dead Parrot Sketch,” which first aired in 1969 and starred John Cleese as a parrot owner, is an example of a comedy routine that the class will explore.
There’s a good chance a dead parrot will find its way into Gavin Hawk’s January 2025 Eckerd College Winter Term course titled Sketch Comedy Writing. The course surveys and analyzes iconic sketches from television shows in America, Great Britain and Canada—from trailblazers like Your Show of Shows to more modern programs like Key & Peele. Using examples from those shows as models, students will then write their own sketches in a variety of styles.
Hawk, professor of theatre at Eckerd, explains that sketch comedy “is an offshoot of vaudeville, and it’s usually about a three- to five-minute scene that involves a strong comic premise. It’s called a sketch because it’s a very quick approximation of a place and people and a situation. The characters are not meant to be three-dimensional; they tend to have one quality to them. And then whatever the absurd thing is becomes what’s called the comic premise, and that is repeated over and over again. Think of it as a short piece of theatre that is wrapped around a singular comic premise.”
That premise, Hawks adds, often involves taking a normal situation and turning it upside down. Take the famous “Dead Parrot Sketch,” he says. The sketch first aired on the BBC comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1969 and starred John Cleese as a parrot owner and Michael Palin as a pet shop owner.
“The customer is coming in to return the parrot that he bought only hours before,” Hawk explains. “That’s normal. Until the proprietor asks, ‘What’s wrong with it?’ The customer says the parrot is dead. That becomes the first unusual thing. Then the proprietor responds with, no, it’s not dead. It’s resting. Then the sketch becomes a series of dialogue that we want more of.
“So now the customer is trying to convince the proprietor that the parrot is truly dead and that the proprietor hoodwinked him. So the proprietor comes up with a series of different excuses and reasons why the parrot is actually alive, but just very, very sleepy.
“Eventually it comes to this hilarious rant by a frustrated John Cleese, who goes off on all the different iterations of death. That it’s an ‘ex-parrot,’ that it has ‘ceased to be,’ that it has ‘run down the curtain and joined the [bleedin’] choir invisible.’ All these different ways of saying it’s dead.
“Finally the proprietor says he’ll take the parrot back and exchange it for another. The proprietor leaves, comes back and says he’s all out of parrots. But he’s got a slug. And Cleese asks, ‘Does it talk?’
Professor of Theatre Gavin Hawk started teaching at Eckerd College in 2006.
“The idea for this came when one of the writers tried to get his mechanic to believe that something was wrong with his car, when his mechanic insisted that it was perfectly fine. And what they did was ask, ‘Instead of a car, what if it was an animal that you were trying to return?’”
A graduate of The Juilliard School’s Drama Division, Hawk earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in acting and directing from California State University, Long Beach. He has performed in and directed numerous plays in the Tampa Bay area and recently won Best Director of a Musical from BroadwayWorld Tampa for his direction of the rock opera Green Day’s American Idiot at American Stage theatre company. In February 2025, he’ll perform in the play The People Downstairs at Stageworks Theatre in Tampa.
Hawk points out that sketch comedy flourished as an art form in the 1960s and ’70s with theatre troupes like The Second City in Chicago and Toronto and The Groundlings in Los Angeles. But in October 1975, Hawk says, a late-night TV show rocketed sketch comedy into the stratosphere. “That’s when Saturday Night Live premiered and changed the landscape. And many of the featured players on SNL came from Second City or The Groundlings.”
Hawk, who has taught the writing course several times since he arrived at Eckerd in 2006, says his aim is to show his students “all kinds of different sketches from different areas and give them a wide breadth. I want them to get an appreciation for the art form and some knowledge of how to write it. And I hope it will free them up and give them the confidence to try other kinds of writing too.”
Throughout the course, students will do staged readings of one another’s sketch comedy scenes, and if past courses are an indication of things to come, Hawk expects some serious knee-slapping. “We’re going to be laughing throughout the whole thing,” he says. “That’s the best part—when somebody really nails something and it’s so good.”
