Best. Python. Skits. Ever.

I was watching yesterday the first box of episodes of Monty Python. Specifically, the second episode ever aired. I think it was called "Sheep".

I stared in disbelief at the "Flying Sheep" sketch. I have watched it over... and over... and over again. I can't help but keep staring at Harold ("BAAAAA. BAAAA") teaching his fellow sheep to fly. The face of Graham Chapman is absolutely priceless - the farmer who is intrigued by the "enormous possibilities of bovine aviation". It's so wonderfully absurd it hurts.

But... ahh. The part where Michael Palin and John Cleese start explaining the "bovine airline", while speaking faux / real french and giving out a demonstration.... Oh. My. God. Funniest stuff ever.... Cleese is INCREDIBLY funny on that one...

Any others you can think of?

 

"MY HOVERCRAFT IS FULL OF EELS"

 

Dead Parrot and Argument Clinic are two of my favorites. Also like Hell's Grannies.

Jeff

 

Ooh! and the Salad Days (A Sam Peckinpah film) skit. One of the funniest skits ever just because it's so over-the-top.

 

Cheese Shop


and, reminding me of my school days...


"Romanes eunt domus" from "Life Of Brian"





Nobby.

 

"It's a bit runny, sir.

I DON'T CARE HOW F_____G RUNNY IT IS!"

 

SPAM

 

Which record had the awful school band trying to play the 2001 theme? I roll on the floor every time I hear that.

 

The Dead Parrot & The Pointed Sticks sketches

 

the eloquent slaughterhouse architect whose design for a resort hotel (complete with conveyor belt and rotating knives) is rejected by the company ...

Yes, well, that's the kind of blinkard, philistine, pig-ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage. You sit there on your loathsome, spotted behinds, squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker's cuss for the starving artist ...

 

The Spanish Inquisition!!!! I still laugh uncontrollably whenever I see that episode. The way they keep breaking in to other sketches during the show was crazy!!!

I also need to mention my favorite Python cartoon: The Killer Cars!!!

 

I always liked Book Shop, the one bit about naval officers stranded in a raft, debating which person to eat first, and one brief parody of a "How to" show (how to play the flute, how to cure all the diseases in the world...).

 

My favourites:

Bed Sketch ("we want to buy a bed please!")

Spanish Inquisition (jarring chord)

Architect Sketch

How To Give Up Being a Mason




Phil

 

"I'd like to have an argument please." Brilliant timing!

The Blancmanges from the planet Skyron, in the galaxy of Andromeda. "They mean to win Wimbledon!"

Too many to mention, really...

 

AND NOW, WE'LL LEARN TO DEFEND OURSELVES AGAINST A MAN ARMED... WITH A BANANA!

I almost laughed out loud when I remembered the sketch. Makes me think John Cleese & Graham Chapman were 75% of what Python was.

 

Nudge Nudge, The Ministry of Silly Walks, Biggles Writes a Letter (see you at the Sax-Coburgs' canasta evening... that should puzzle her), Auto Insurance and the whole "The Bishop" sequence (we was too late), the Fish License (where all the pets are named Eric), production of the Captain Scott film (with the really unrealistic looking lion), marriage counselor, career advice (where the guy initially wants to be a lion tamer, but finally decides to go into banking), lots of other things.

As for cartoons, my choice would be the monster baby in the crib eating every old lady that tries to pat on the cheek or something (Oh, what a lovely.... ), and finally turning against its own nanny.

 

The Four Yorkshiremen

"Every morning, we'd have to get up half an hour before we went to bed, walk twelve miles to get to mill AND pay mill owner for the privilege of working there and when we would get home, Dad would slash us about the face and neck with a broken bottle. IF we were lucky."

Try and tell young people today stories like that...
and they don't believe you!

 

I've always been partial to an elk's--I mean, Anne Elk's--presentation of her theory regarding brontosauruses (thin at one end; much, much thicker in the middle; and then thin again at the far end).

 

That's probably the funniest sketch Cleese/Chapman ever wrote, though it's technically not a Python sketch, right?

Another masterpiece is the undertaker sketch at the end of the excellent cannibalism episode. "We'll eat your mother, and then if you feel guilty about it afterwards, we can dig a grave and throw up into it."

Ethel the Frog (ie, the Piranha Brothers) also stands up to many MANY repeated viewings. "He used... sarcasm."

 

Wow, I love this stuff:

-How to defend yourselves from a man with a banana
-I'd like to have an argument
-Silly Walk
-Sit on my face and tell me that you love me

All some of my favorites as well. I also have to add "The Black Knight" (tis a flesh wound) and the screaming Frenchman (I fart in your general direction) both from Holy Grail.

Monty Python has so many, it's hard to name just a few.

And now for something completely different...

 

What's the point of going abroad if you're just another tourist carted around
in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in
their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their
Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea - "Oh they don't make it properly
here, do they, not like at home" - and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling
fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in
their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White's suncream all over their puffy raw
swollen purulent flesh 'cos they "overdid it on the first day." And being
herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentales with their
modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools
full of fat German businessmen pretending they're acrobats forming pyramids and
frightening the children and barging into queues and if you're not at your
table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the
first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the
hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with
nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a
big **** presenting Flamenco for Foreigners. And adenoidal typists from
Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying to pick up hairy
bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there's an excursion to
the local Roman Remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding
Watney's Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant
with local colour and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep
singing "Torremolinos, torremolinos" and complaining about the food - "It's so
greasy isn't it?" - and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from
Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday's Daily
Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this
country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up
over the Cuba Libres. And sending tinted postcards of places they don't
realise they haven't even visited to "All at number 22, weather wonderful, our
room is marked with an 'X'. Food very greasy but we've found a charming little
local place hidden away in the back streets where they serve Watney's Red
Barrel and cheese and onion crisps and the accordionist plays 'Maybe it's
because I'm a Londoner'." And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton
airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA-type
sandwiches and you can't even get a drink of Watney's Red Barrel because you're
still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you're thirsty and
there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the
plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although
your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before
it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac
till six because of "unforeseen difficulties", i.e. the permanent strike of
Air Traffic Control in Paris - and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take
off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing
"enterovioform" and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs
officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn't there to take you to the
hotel that hasn't yet been finished. And when you finally get to the
half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying half your holiday
money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there's no water in the pool,
there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the bog and there's only a
bleeding lizard in the bidet. And half the rooms are double booked and you
can't sleep anyway because of the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the
foundations of the hotel next door - and you're plagues by appalling apprentice
chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers'
wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just
like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again, and fat American
matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any
mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop
out. And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera
epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the previous outbreak of
Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe - and
meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting sixteen-year-olds for kissing
in the streets and shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn't like Franco. And
then on the last day in the airport lounge everyone's comparing sunburns,
drinking Nasty Spumante, buying cartons of duty free "cigarillos" and using up
their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish National costume and awful straw
donkeys and bullfight posters with your name on "Ordoney, El Cordobes and Brian
Pules of Norwich" and 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy and Franco, and
everybody's talking about coming again next year and you swear you never will
although there you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight antique
Iberian airplane.....

 

There are just too many to mention:

"The Lumberjack Song"
"Crunchy Frog"
The Holy Hand Grenade piece in Holy Grail
"Nudge Nudge"
"Cannibalism"

The Sex Ed scene in Meaning Of Life.







Burma!

 

Chiron,

You've got that memorized, eh?

 

Why did you say "Burma"?

I panicked!

"Oh, intercourse the penguin!"