The Church cop character breaks in saying “What’s all this then, AH-men?”, with the first part being a Brit cop’s initial phrase when investigating some minor brouhaha, and the AH-men constituting the church element.
Zaniness dissected. 
To explain a joke is, as ever, to kill it.
It’s not dead. It’s merely resting.
It was only years later, while talking with an anglophile public servant, that I found out that the “Ministry of Silly Walks” was not mearly absurdist, but satirical.
It’s joined the bleedin’ choir invisible. It is an ex-joke.
Nitpick, that was Carol Cleveland, not Connie Booth. Carol was often featured in Monty Python sketches. Connie played Polly in “Fawlty Towers” and IIRC was married to John Cleese.
Nope, Connie Booth was the witch in Holy Grail. Cite and cite. Connie Booth played a few roles in Monty Python’s Flying Circus as well, including Bevis the lumberjack’s best girl. Carol Cleveland played Zoot and Dingo “You must give all a good spanking!” in Holy Grail.
Wait - so St. Loony Up the Cream Bun and Jam was a catholic church? 
Unsurprisingly, Britons have enjoyed – since way back – taking the mickey out of the ridiculous side of their country’s Civil Service, often in a zany-ly silly way. Decades before Python, the humorist Beachcomber was writing of the absurd doings of the Ministry of Bubbleblowing. Dickens does much the same thing in Little Dorrit, where characters have to spend much time frustratingly in the toils of an inefficient and seemingly useless bureaucratic department called the Circumlocution Office. It emerges late in the book, that in fact the C.O. fills a worthwhile role: i.e., it provides make-work for bothersome upper-middle-class nitwits who, with more time on their hands, might wreak genuine active mischief.
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise ans wonderful,
The Church Fuzz nicked them all.
That goes into the Favorite Hymn thread.
Well, he’s…he’s, ah…probably pining for the fjords.
Lovely plumage.
a witch a witch!
Do Americans not have the expression “cop a feel”, used by adolescent boys? “cop” in that phrase is the same as in “fair cop” - the idea of being grabbed or touched.
The reason “cop” became synonomous for an arrest was that in English common law, the peace officer had to actually physically seize the individual. Once the peace office touched the individual, the individual was under arrest and from that point running away was resisting arrest. Since “cop” is a term meaning to touch, it became by extension a term for arrest.
We do indeed have the term ‘cop a feel’ meaning to slyly grab a woman’s breast. I think the confusion is because ‘a fair cop’ has to do with being arrested, but in America ‘cop’ almost always means ‘police officer’. In that context it’s a noun, not a verb. Though we do have the phrase ‘cop a plea’ meaning to accept a plea bargain, and the phrase ‘cop out’ which means to dodge something with a flimsy excuse (anything, not just legal matters).
Before I knew for sure I thought the British phrase was 'it’s a fair court’…
Damn! You’re right. It must have been the nose that threw me off. 
Seriously, I think I got so used to Carol Cleveland being the token Python female that I never even thought about it being anyone else.