![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Python canon
The reason I was trying to get one elusive Monty Python sketch identified was to complete one of my little pointless projects, an attempt to determine the most popular of the sketches. I'd long ago made a list of six Flying Circus sketches I considered iconic: that is, that they'd passed beyond being famous Python sketches and become general cultural icons, things that people would make reference to even outside specific referential context. These were:
Only the longest lists found room for other favorites of mine, such as the surely iconic "Election Night Special" [2/19] (whose Silly Party candidate names were actually adopted by the Monster Raving Loony Party) and "Dennis Moore" [3/37] (the Robin Hood parody), or "Gumby Brain Specialist" [3/32] (a particular delight for the way that Palin cracks up when Cleese's doctor looks for his brain in his trousers), "Ron Obvious" [1/10] (the hapless man who tries to jump the English Channel), or "Sir George Head" [1/9] (the Kilimanjaro expedition sketch). And nobody at all named another dozen of my favorites, notably many from the third season, "Njorl's Saga" [3/27], "Erizabeth L." [3/29], "The man who speaks in anagrams" [3/30] (which has rendered me unable to think of The Taming of the Shrew as anything other than The Mating of the Wersh), "The Summarize Proust Competition" [3/31] (nobody named that? nobody?), "Climbing the North Face of the Uxbridge Road" [3/33], or "The British 'Well, Basically' Club" [3/35] (of which I find myself frequently a member). Not very much from the fourth season made any lists, though I do like "Buying an Ant" [4/41], but my other favorite from that season, "Court-martial" [4/42] (the one with "Basingstoke, in Westphalia?") didn't make anybody's list.
Yours?
- 1. The Dead Parrot [season 1, overall episode 8] (which was once even cited by Mrs Thatcher, a person with no detectable sense of humor)
- 2. The Ministry of Silly Walks [2/14] (see, e.g., my icon for this post)
- 3. Spam [2/25] (which has given its name to "junk email")
- 4. The Spanish Inquisition [2/15] (source of the greatest-ever real-life pun: when Gen. Pinochet, the retired Chilean dictator, visited the UK for medical treatment and his presence in the EU was used by a judge in Spain as a chance to slap him with an order to extradite him to face charges for his regime's crimes against citizens of Spain, it surprised and shocked everybody, thus proving that nobody expects the Spanish extradition)
- 5. The Lumberjack Song [1/9]
- 6. Nudge Nudge [1/3]
- 7. The Cheese Shop [3/33]
- 8. The Argument Clinic [3/29]
- 9. The Funniest Joke in the World [1/1]
- 10. Self-Defense Against Fresh Fruit [1/4] (perhaps the only one that's funnier in the compilation film remake, And Now For Something Completely Different, than on Flying Circus)
- 11. The Upper-Class Twit of the Year [1/12] (like other Python sports sketches, it goes on far too long)
- 12. Dirty Fork [1/3] (which I find over-the-top: I identify too closely with the discomfiture of the diners)
Only the longest lists found room for other favorites of mine, such as the surely iconic "Election Night Special" [2/19] (whose Silly Party candidate names were actually adopted by the Monster Raving Loony Party) and "Dennis Moore" [3/37] (the Robin Hood parody), or "Gumby Brain Specialist" [3/32] (a particular delight for the way that Palin cracks up when Cleese's doctor looks for his brain in his trousers), "Ron Obvious" [1/10] (the hapless man who tries to jump the English Channel), or "Sir George Head" [1/9] (the Kilimanjaro expedition sketch). And nobody at all named another dozen of my favorites, notably many from the third season, "Njorl's Saga" [3/27], "Erizabeth L." [3/29], "The man who speaks in anagrams" [3/30] (which has rendered me unable to think of The Taming of the Shrew as anything other than The Mating of the Wersh), "The Summarize Proust Competition" [3/31] (nobody named that? nobody?), "Climbing the North Face of the Uxbridge Road" [3/33], or "The British 'Well, Basically' Club" [3/35] (of which I find myself frequently a member). Not very much from the fourth season made any lists, though I do like "Buying an Ant" [4/41], but my other favorite from that season, "Court-martial" [4/42] (the one with "Basingstoke, in Westphalia?") didn't make anybody's list.
Yours?
no subject
But my favorite obscure-ish Python sketch is "composer with the long name of Ulm."
Of the better known ones, I quite like "How Not to Be Seen," the _full_ "Dead Parrot" sketch, the other pet shop sketch ("I can do you a goldfish"), and the "We've got an eater!" mortuary sketch.
no subject
no subject
Yesterday's Radio 4 programme on the voluntary sector by Andy Haldane (Chief Economist at the Bank of England) was quite interesting, but the part where he asks a group of bankers how many people they think do voluntary work in the UK was both hilarious and telling. Start at 1:20 in... http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06ryrmz
This was the sketch it put me in mind of...
no subject
no subject
A sketch that you didn't list, that was a particular favorite of ours, was set in a travel agency. "Would you like to come upstairs ... or have you come to arrange a holiday?" "I'm Smoke-too-much. Well, you'd better cut down a little then. Oh.. Smoke-too-much so I'd better cut down a little then. I expect you get jokes about your name all the time. No, I've never noticed it before." "I can't say the letter B because I was bitten by a bat. A cat you mean? No, a bat. ... Well can you say the letter K? ... What a silly bunt!" "Torres Molinos, Torres Molinos" "If you don't shut up, I will have to shoot you."
One of the albums was three-sided. That is, there was one disc, and one side was normal, but the flip side had two sets of parallel (that's not quite the right word) grooves that each went from the outside completely to the inside. You couldn't see that there were two. Depending on where the record was in its rotation when the needle set down, you'd either hear one set of sketches or a different sketch, at random, and it took us some time to figure out why we only heard some of the sketches some of the times we played it.
Things I disliked: Gumbies, Twits, and any time one of the characters spent a very long time leading another character through various odd routes to the final destination.
Other things I liked that you didn't mention include the job aptitude interview with the chartered accountant who wanted to tame lions (which he thought were very small) and Mrs Premise & Mrs Conclusion with the penguin on top of the television exploding somehow leading to a discussion of burying a live cat and flushing budgies and then to a trip to chat with Mrs Proust (perhaps I have compressed more than one sketch into a single memory.)
(I found my way here via a link from Andrew Ducker.)
no subject
The Python record albums get little, but not no, mention in the lists I looked at. I never listened much to them: for some reason I didn't care for them much (or the books). I did, however, once have the opportunity to confirm for myself that the 3-sided album really is.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
I tend to think of portions of sketches as the most memorable and/or popular Python bits. Thus, "wafer thin" (from Mr Creosote), we have non sequitor introductions of the larch, the penguin on the telly, "Every sperm is sacred," etc.
Is The Funniest Joke the one about the killer joke? That was most memorable for me, as I saw it on a European ferry ride, where the TV had captions in 4 languages -- including English, when they spoke German. (No, I don't remember the joke itself.)
I'm surprised at the omission of The Crimson Permanent Assurance short from the beginning of Meaning of Life. Brilliant, that one was.
no subject
Nine sketches from Meaning of Life got listed. Crimson Permanent Assurance was not one of them. I, for one, liked that a lot better than anything else in the movie.
no subject
I also very much like numbers 1,2,3,7 & 8