What makes me laugh as much as the unique phrases he says is the enthusiasm and drive that he puts into his expressions. And it seems to be all his own work when he puts in the deep thrust of feeling, because all the same phrases are said elsewhere in the movie in the way that a human says them and clearly in the way in which he was taught them; ie nice and slowly and relatively clearly; just like you would in normal conversation while teaching a bird. He then appears to embellish it into his own stage act and adds the emphasis in the process. I haven't seen this in parrots before, because even though we ourselves have had African greys, amazons and all manner of other lesser talented talkers, they really are one-dimensional and simply mimic (brilliantly) what their owner says to them and in the exact same key that it is said, too.
Take for example the telephone ring that almost all parrots pick up at some point. There may be several doors closed (or open) in the house between the parrot's natural roosting place (usually its cage) and the telephone. Depending upon how many of the doors are open in between the bird and the telephone will usually depend how loud the ring tone is that he repeats. For example, if all the doors are open, he produces a ring for the louder noise that it makes to him. A slightly more muffled sound is made when he has one door closed between him and the telephone, and so on. We had an amazon that droive us mad in such fashion with 3 perfect ring tones, all of which had us running the the telephone whenever he started the hoax tones.
But this guy in the video takes it to another level, because he just completely embellishes the whole line and goes off on his Lawrence Olivier stage version of it, whether or not it was in the script. The bit where he shouts (presumably at his owner while cleaning his perch), "Are you having a laugh" and spreads his feathers in the process is a great example of this. There's no way an owner would teach a bird to shout like this and on the face of it to be so aggressive and cheeky. This is what I believe makes the amazon talkers (and especially the yellow napes) unique among talkers.
