I searched the archives - can’t believe this one hasn’t been done already.
FWIW, I think the Flying Circus episodes are maybe the funniest comedy ever to come out of England.
Off the top of my head, here are my top 4 - funniest is #1:
Buying a bed (“You’ll have to excuse Mr Verity - he does tend to exaggerate. Every number he gives you will be TEN TIMES too large.”)
Police station - where one policeman can only hear if you talk in a loud, high pitched voice, another only if you talk in a low voice, and a third only if you talkreallyreallyquickly.
Ron Obvious trying to jump across the English Channel (etc.)
Italian classes for Italians sketch (episode 1!)
Guess who just indulged himself with the A&E complete DVD set
Okay also allowed in this thread - real life events that reminded you of a Python sketch (and where you probably couldn’t explain to those around you what was so funny!)
E.g. saw the play of The Lion King tonight - there’s a section where one of the characters is trying to jump across a river - he does a puny little jump and lands on his backside - totally reminded me of Ron Obvious.
Well, I hate to be obvious, but I’ve got to go with the Fish License sketch–you know, the one with Eric the Half-a-Bee? Laughed myself sick the first time I heard it–more or less literally. I developed probably the worst case of hiccups ever recorded; they lasted all day.
I would have to think about it for a long time (there were so many!) but for now the “Git family” and “dirty vicar” sketches come to mind. There’s nothing like inspired lunacy.
“mum, there’s a dead vicar on the landing.”
“what’s his diocese?”
“well, he looks a bit canterburish to me…”
heeheehee.
my all time favorite is the “every sperm is sacred” bit from “meaning of life”. anything with tap-dancing vicars is fine by me.
carol cleveland!!! (“but that’s my only line!”)
the sketch with the architects building the hotel, and the one wants to turn it into an abbatoir. (“i’ve always wanted to be a free mason. i’d be very quiet and sit in the back!”)
darren s, i am sooo jealous! and on dvd yet, you lucky fellow!
We just bought the DVD set for my dad for his birthday. It cost $200 at Camelot Music, but man is it worth it, especially since I get to watch them too.
It’s hard for me to choose favorites, but these come to mind:
Gumby Brain Surgery!
“My brain hurts.” “It’ll have to come out!”
That one…with the giant hedgehog? “Dinsdale!..Dinsdale!..”
The Fish License sketch had me on the floor, it was hilarious!
I have an audio tape of Python stuff from a friend, and I’d have to say that one of my ABSOLUTE favorites is with John Cleese as Anne Elk being interviewed by Graham Chapman. “That which is mine…is mine.”
Also the cheese shop, and the book shop- “Do you have ‘A Sale of Two Titties’ by Charles Dikkens, the well-known Dutch author? That’s Dikkens with two Ks.”
There’s a sketch with John Cleese as Beethoven trying to write the beginning phrase of the Ninth Symphony, and Graham Chapman is playing his wife, and she keeps coming in and interrupting him, asking what he wants for lunch, then bringing in a vacuum cleaner. That gets me rolling as well.
Nudge Nudge Wink Wink is also a fave. There’s another one, I have NO idea what it’s called, it starts out with Graham Chapman & Carol Cleveland having drinks at his house, and then Eric Idle stops in- he only met G.C. once in a pub, and is incredibly rude, then a bunch of people that E.I. invited come in, and it gets more and more looney. G.C. ends up getting shot in the end of the sketch. My faves are John Cleese sitting on the cat and Terry Jones as his wife, laughing really hard and then saying, “Ooh! I wet 'em!” It’s just insane.
…past the rotating knives [rotating knives?] Yes, does that not fit in with your plans? [Do you mean to say that you intend to kill our tenants?]
I was arguing in my spare time.
And now to Karl Marx: Who won the English Football Cup of 1949?
Four hours to bury the cat? Yes, wouldn’t keep still.
And 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 arse 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…
Salvation Fuzz (that’s the title listed on my CD for the “dead bishop on the landing” sketch)
Fish License
The dead parrot
Lumberjack
A Background to History
