Everyone seems to have heard of parrots saying “Polly want a cracker,” but where did this come from? If the origin of the phrase can’t be established, I’d settle for knowing how it was popularized. My first thought was maybe Long John Silver’s parrot had said it in either the book or movie versions of Treasure Island, since as Cecil has noted Silver popularized many of our pirate cliches. But Silver’s parrot was named “Captain Flint”, not Polly. Searching wikipedia I see that the phrase was used in a 1947 Bugs Bunny cartoon, but I don’t see anything to indicate that Bugs originated the phrase.
Searching the forum reveals a couple brief threads on this, but with no definitive answers, other than that the name “Polly” for a parrot apparently dates back centuries. Still, I can’t help but think the image of a parrot saying “Polly want a cracker” wouldn’t have been well known until the invention of movies – how many people had even seen a parrot in the 19th century?
I recall a Popeye cartoon, it was the ones where Popeye mumbles a lot so it must’ve been an older version, where the Polly parrot wanted a cracker.
I wonder if the two could be seperate, you know let’s say Polly as a name for a parrot dating back a hundred years, while any parrot by any name asking a cracker could date to another time, before the two got combined
In Gustave Flaubert’s Un Couer Simple, written in 1877-ish, it’s mentioned that people are unpleasantly surprised that a parrot’s name is Loulou and not Jacquot. So it’s not Polly (though in some English translations, it’s translated as such), but it is evidence that the common-parrot-name phenomenon is well over a hundred years old and not exclusive to the English-speaking world.
This is hilarious, and includes one of the most painfully labored reproductions of the “Waiter Waiter! Have you got frog legs?” “No sir, I’ve always walked this way.” jokes I’ve ever read:
According to a florist’s magazine “Jacks are becoming cheap.”
This may be true, but we have known men who would have been
willing to pay $10 for one to put with the two already in their
hands.
Though I, too, see babbling about this on the Internet, Long John Silver’s parrot is in fact named “Captain Flint,” and at no point expresses an interest in crackers.
That’s interesting. When I was a kid in the early 60s there was a shoe store chain called Poll Parrot, and they all had a parrot in the store. I had no idea the phrase existed before that.
Ha! When I was a kid in the 1960s (or it may even have been the late 1950s) I can remember seeing junk shop window that had a stuffed parrot in a cage together with a packet of Pollyfilla (a brand of spackling paste in wide use at the time). As a kid, I thought it was a pretty good joke (and, more to the point, I understood it right away).
Polly as a standard name for a parrot has been around for a long, long time: centuries I think. Why or when it started I do not know.
Nothing. It was extremely common for magazines to have filler, including short jokes. I have no doubt you could have found the same joke as filler in many magazines from the turn of the century.
Further hijack: what’s striking me about that joke book is the “Irish = stupid” stereotype, that seems to have been long superseded in the US (Polacks? Blondes?), but was current in the UK when I was a kid.