What do you think this the funniest Monty Python sketch that only appears on Flying Circus? This means nothing from And Now For Something Completely Different or Live at the Hollywood Bowl.
Fish Slapping Dance.
Fish Slapping Dance (John Cleese agrees as I recall)
Pretty much every “good” sketch I can think of is in one of those two…except one:
Cheese Shop.
I’d go with the Piranha Brothers.
“Everyone was terrified of Doug. I seen grown men pull their own heads off rather than see Doug. Even Dinsdale was frightened of Doug.”
“What did he do?”
" … He used sarcasm! He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and … satire."
I’m rather partial to Confuse-a-Cat.
The Cycling Tour, but that’s an entire episode, not a sketch.
Silly walks and the Argument are top rated for me. Awe hell, so are Arthur ‘Two Sheds’ Jackson, Buying a Bed, and the Piranah Brothers.
I don’t know about a favourite, but I do know the the Parrot Sketch is way overrated.
Too many funny ones to mention.
I’ve always been a big fan of “Scott of the Antarctic” - I love the bit about the giant penguin with tentacles…
I think there are many MP sketches from the TV show that are under-appreciated. A few that come to mind:
Army Protection Racket: Two mobsters shake down the army. That’s just a hilarious premise to me, and I love how they walk menacingly around the colonel’s office.
RAF Banter: RAF pilots during WWII inexplicably lose their ability to banter with proper lingo.
The Watch Smuggler: Another very simple premise carried through to its extreme. A guy going through customs behaves incredibly suspiciously.
Here are two sketches with essentially the same premise that I always found funny. They are both situations in which someone is supposed to act with bravery, but go completely the other way and make only veiled attempts to hide it:
Sinking ship and The Short Straw
My dad was always amused by Hell’s Grannies
I forgot about “Batley Townswomen’s Guild Presents the Battle of Pearl Harbor.”
:D:D:D
The game show parodies were always fun, especially “Prejudice”. I often find myself uttering the phrase “I can’t think of anything more derogatory than Belgian!”
Hell’s Grannies is definately up there.
Also, not sure of the sketch title, but, the one where they are climbing the sidewalks and streets like they are scaling a mountain, complete with ropes and belt cables. The image of them clinging to the sidewalk, hugging it for dear life like they are going to fall is just hilarious.
The Dirty Fork sketch. “Mungo, never kill a customer!”
The Village Idiot
Senile Delinquents
Blackmail
The Life of Tchaikovsky
Men Who Are Actually Mice
The Funniest Joke in the World
Anne Elk
Caribou
Denis Moore
Love Confuse-a-cat! And it seldom gets much mention.
But number one for me is “It’s the Mind”:
The undertaker sketch
Upper-Class Twit of the Year
Fish Slapping Dance.