With last night’s light snow and this morning’s kerfuffle over the Nobel Peace Prize, Turkish decided it would be a perfect day to debut his one-cat show, an impression of Darth Cheney in exile that he calls “Why Am I Sitting On My Ass Out Here In the Cold When I Should Be Killing Something?”

The score is a work in progress — shotgun blasts and a friend screaming, lightly armored Humvees encountering IEDs, the shredding of the Constitution by a flabby pair of bloody hands — so you’ll have to make do with the visual for now. An imperfect performance, to be sure, but so are they all these days. As the villainous theatre cat Tom told the cockroach Archy in “The Old Trouper” by Don Marquis:

the stage is not what it

used to be tom says

he puts his front paw

on his breast and says

they don t have it any more

they don t have it here

• Late addendum: Kevin Jones of Mother Jones.com, who does a weekly cat-blogging feature as part of his daily blog, recently asked readers for pix of special guest cats to plug into his newsletter, Drum Beat (you can subscribe to it here). Turkish is the second guest cat, with a special guest appearance by Miss Mia Sopaipilla. Shots of table cream all around!

Here’s an interesting article in The New York Times about a pending reunion of the five surviving members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which will kick off a six-hour IFC documentary titled “Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut).”

Now, don’t get me wrong; I love the Pythons. I started watching them in college and have a closet packed with DVDs of their TV show and movies. But when I read a line like this — “To find the equivalent of the Pythons’ kind of wordplay and punning (verbal and visual) you have to turn to written humor, which may be where some of the Pythons’ inspiration came from in the first place.” — I feel badly for Philip Proctor, Phil Austin, Peter Bergman and David Ossman, a.k.a. The Firesign Theatre, a homegrown outfit I first encountered in high school. I have a second closet full of their vinyl and a pretty substantial collection of CDs.

The Firesign Theatre took to the airwaves on Radio Free Oz at KPFK in 1967, two years before the Pythons cranked up their BBC act, and were regulars on KRLA a year later. Anyone who enjoys wordplay and punning could do much, much worse than listen to Firesign classics such as “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him,” “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers,” “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus,” “Everything You Know Is Wrong” or “The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra” — which has its roots in, of all things, the British author Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series (a tale for which the world is not yet prepared).

And therein lies the rub. You pretty much had to listen to the Firesigns, which requires more imagination than watching TV, the same way reading does. They were never as good as the Pythons in front of a camera, but then again the Pythons were never any great shakes as an audio act. At least half of what makes the Pythons funny is their physical, visual comedy.

I never saw the Pythons live, but I saw the Firesigns in Denver once, and it was a memorable experience, with a great deal of (and perhaps too much) audience participation, especially from me and my pals. They’re still performing today. But drop a Firesign Theatre reference into a casual conversation and someone will probably suggest you pop in to the local ER for regrooving. Do a dead-parrot quip and you’re the life of the party.

We may not all be bozos on this bus, but at least some of us are.

Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, dead at 72 of complications from chemotherapy for a bone-marrow transplant after developing leukemia. Also, Henry Gibson, perhaps best known for his nonsensical “Laugh-In” poetry, of cancer at 73.

I like to annoy my friend Hal with e-mails whose subject is “A pome,” which probably has its roots in Gibson’s “Laugh-In” shtick. And PP&M managed to make John Denver sound good with “Leaving On a Jet Plane.”