10 reasons why Monty Python still makes us laugh
The dead parrot, nudge nudge, the lumberjack song – all great sketches. But do they still make us laugh? As the Pythons begin a final run in London, here are 10 quotes from some lesser-known classics.
1. Golden age of air ballooning
Voiceover (Eric Idle): Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin’s behaviour on that flight in 1900 had incredible, far-reaching consequences. For one of the falling ministers, the talented Herr Von Maintlitz, architect of the new Geman expansionist farm policy, fell on top of an old lady in Nimwegen, killing her outright. Her daughter, Alice suffered severe cerebral damage from the talented minister’s heavy briefcase but was nursed back to life by an English doctor, Henderson.
Eventually, they married and their eldest son, George Henderson, was the father of Mike Henderson, producer and director of The Golden Age of Ballooning.
2. How to feed a goldfish
Presenter (Michael Palin): Once a week, give your goldfish a really good meal. Here’s one specially recommended by the Board of Irresponsible People. First, some cold consommé or gazpacho. Then some sausages with spring greens, jacket potatoes, bread and gravy…
3. What the stars foretell
Mrs O (Eric Idle): No, the stars in the paper, you cloth-eared heap of anteater’s catarrh! The zodiacal signs. The horoscopic fates, the astrological portents, the omens, the genethliac prognostications, the mantalogical harbingers, the vaticinal utterances, the fatidical premonitory utterances of the mantalogical omens. What do the bleeding stars in the paper predict, forecast prophesy, foretell?
4. Talking about things
Presenter (Michael Palin): So where do we stand? Where do we stand? Where do we sit? Where do we come? Where do we go? What do we do? What do we say? What do we eat? What do we drink? What do we think? What do we do?
5. Storytime
Storyteller (Eric Idle): Rumpletweezer ran the dinky-tinky shop in the foot of the magic oak tree, by the wobbly dum-dum bush, in the shade of the magic glade, down in Dingly Dell. Here he sold contraceptives…
6. Travel agent
Tourist (Eric Idle): I’m fed up of going abroad being treated like a sheep. What’s the point of being carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty, mindless oafs from Kettering and Boventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, bomplaining about the tea? “Oh, they don’t make it property here, do they? Not like at home.”
And stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney’s Red Barrel and calamaris and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White’s sun cream all over their puffy, raw, swollen, purulent flesh ’cause they overdid it on the first day.
7. Merchant banker
Merchant banker (John Cleese): I’m glad to say that I’ve got the go-ahead to lend you the money you require. Yes! We will, of course, want as security the deeds of your house, of your aunt’s house, of your second cousin’s house, of your wife’s parents’ house and of your granny’s bungalow.
And we will in addition need a controlling interest in your new company, unrestricted access to your private bank account, the deposit in our vaults of your three children as hostages, and a full legal indemnity against any acts of embezzlement carried out against you by any members of our staff during the normal course of their duties.
No, I’m afraid we couldn’t accept your dog instead of your youngest child. We would like to suggest a brand-new scheme of ours under which 51 per cent of both your dog and your wife pass to us in the event of your suffering a serious accident.
8. Psychiatrist milkman
Milkman (Eric Idle): You’re quite clearly suffering from a repressive libido complex, probably the result of an unhappy childhood, coupled with acute insecurity in adolescence, which has resulted in an attenuation of the libido complex.
Housewife (Graham Chapman): You are a bloody milkman!
9. The mouse problem
Interviewee (John Cleese): Well, it’s not a question of wanting to be a mouse. It just sort of happens to you. All of a sudden you realise – that’s what you want to be.
Interviewer (Terry Jones): When did you first notice these – shall we say? – tendencies?
Interviewee: Well, I was about 17. And some mates and me went to a party… and… well, we had quite a lot to drink and, er, then some of the fellas there started handing cheese around. Well, just out of curiosity I tried a bit and, well, that was that.
10. Literary football
Presenter (Eric Idle): From the plastic arts we turn to football. Last night in the Stadium of Light, Jarrow, we witnessed the resuscitation of a great footballing tradition when Jarrow United came of age, in a European sense, with an almost Proustian display of modern existentialist football. Virtually annihilating by midfield moral argument the now surely obsolescent catenaccio defensive philosophy of Signor Alberto Franfrino.
Bologna, indeed, were a side intellectually out-argued by a Jarrow team thrusting and bursting with aggressive Kantian positivism, and outstanding in this fine Jarrow team was my man of the match, the arch-thinker, free scheming, scarcely ever to be curbed, midfield cogniscento Jimmy Buzzard.
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