I'm pretty sure it was Frank Muir who used the line in a My Word story, but it wasn't the punchline in the story I heard - he just used it in passing. The line his story was based on was, 'Mene, mene, tekel upharsin' - the Aramaic inscription the mysterious finger wrote on the wall in the Book of Daniel. The translations don't tell you the words are names of coins, or weights of precious metal. The u- of 'upharsin' means 'and'. I can't remember what his pun on the line was.

The Mede and Persian line annoyed hell out of me, because just a few weeks before I heard it, I had done a presentation on the passage in the Aramaic class I was in, and I had used the Mede and Persian line, WHICH I HAD THOUGHT UP FOR MYSELF, not knowing Muir had already come up with it. The Medes and Persians were actually distinct but related peoples, but both the Greeks and the Jews used the names interchangeably.

And yes, the original is "One man's meat is another man's poison."