Feels quite forced. Waiter has to ask the question in an unnaturally ambiguous way for this to work. Do they not know what a parrot (or worse, a human) is and have to use “animal”?
Last time I heard this joke it was a racist slur. It wasn’t funny as such, but it made more sense. There’s no value in trying to revive this in some non-racist form. Let’s just forget it and move on.
Feels quite forced. Waiter has to ask the question in an unnaturally ambiguous way for this to work. Do they not know what a parrot (or worse, a human) is and have to use “animal”?
Last time I heard this joke it was a racist slur. It wasn’t funny as such, but it made more sense. There’s no value in trying to revive this in some non-racist form. Let’s just forget it and move on.
Better wording would have been “hey, does that thing talk?”