According to Wiki: “A number of European and North American species are long-distance migrants; by contrast, the West and South African swallows are non-migratory.”
So the Monty Python quip is actually true. I thought they just threw it in to be funny. Hell, to be honest I didn’t even know African Swallows really existed.
They were also right on target when they said that a five ounce bird could not carry a one pound coconut. It’s a simple question of weight ratio, y’see…
Monty Python owes a lot of its comic roots to Cambridge Footlights ( Footlights - Wikipedia ). That is, comedy performed and written by university students. This often seems to introduce a kind of academic layer under the comedy - sometimes more obvious than others. I bet if we dug deep enough, we’d find that the bits about being an anarcho-syndicalist commune were references to some social history textbook.
The Pythons were all university educated and that gave a unique depth to their humour. The obscure references in the various skits and movies are all drawn from intellectual subjects, especially philosophy.
PS: my 13yr daughter recently elected Socrates for a school project…because she knew him from Monty Python.
As I understand it, all the numbers in The Galaxy Song are roughly correct.
Same thing with Futurama. In one episode, aliens from Omicron Persei 8 come to Earth angry that the broadcast of their favorite TV show was interrupted 1,000 earlier. Omicron Persei is about 1,000 light years from Earth.
IIIIIIIIImmanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable,
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table
David Hume could out-consume Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel.
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.
Yeah, there was some pretty intellectual stuff going on under their clowning.
On the commentary track for Holy Grail, I thought Cleese said they were inspired by the countless student political groups that existed when they were at college: all of them very passionate and all of them a complete waste of time.