Okay, Jackie, here's another ...
A man inherited a parrot from his estranged uncle. He wasn't sure he wanted a parrot, but he thought he'd try living with it for a while and see how things went.
The parrot duly arrived and its cage was installed in the living room. For the first day it didn't say anything at all, and the man was beginning to think that maybe a parrot wasn't such a bad idea after all. But the next morning it began to swear. Not just mild curses, but deep-seated obsenities of a gynaecological and penile nature. It asked questions about the man's parentage as well as suggesting that he didn't know anything about it.
And it didn't stop. It got worse. It would swear loudly whenever the man was in the room, and would practice quietly to itself when he wasn't. After a week, the man was becoming desperate. He'd tried to teach it to say the normal things like "Polly want a cracker?", and it told him where to shove the cracker. He asked the parrot "Who's a pretty boy, then?" And the parrot would reply "Not me, you ____!" and then tell him where to buy pretty boys if he was so ____ _____, ____ keen to have one.
It came to a head about eight days after the parrot arrived. The man's aging mother was due to arrive for dinner. She never swore herself and was quite vocal in her contempt for the intellectual abilities of people who did so. Obviously, he had to stop the parrot from swearing. He tried putting the parrot in different rooms, in the garden shed, in the attic, in the garage, but no matter where he put it, you could hear the swearing quite clearly from the lounge and dining room.
Finally, in absolute panic a few minutes before his mother was due to arrive, he grabbed the parrot by the throat and threw it into the freezer. For a couple of minutes the swearing reached new heights of inventiveness and the parrot managed to plumb new depths of invective and abuse.
Then all of a sudden it stopped. Deathly silence. Nada.
After a few minutes of this, the man's conscience began to prick at him. It wasn't the parrot's fault after all; the uncle hadn't brought it up correctly, that was all. Freezing to death was a cruel way to die, wasn't it? Eventually he found he had to open the freezer door, expecting find a corpse. But while the parrot had a light coating of frost on its feathers, it seemed quite healthy and hopped out of the freezer and on to the man's shoulder, nuzzling up to his neck.
"Okay, old boy," the parrot said, "Fair's fair. I'll be a model of decorum from now on. I'll recite Gray's 'Elegy' and tell morally uplifting stories for your mother. I'll even say 'Polly want a cracker' if you really insist. You win."
The man was nonplussed but delighted. He went and got parrot treats from the cupboard and gave them to the bird, who picked them over rather than wolfing them down, appearing to be thinking deeply.
Finally the parrot looked up as if it wanted to say something but couldn't quite think how to put it. Then it asked: "By the way, old man, what did the chicken do?"
