Looking at the results, the monkeys wrote at least one sensible English word-“mass.”
Another variation on this joke is:
You know they say a million monkies with a million typewriters and a million years to do it could eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare. You know GWB’s last State of the Union address? 5 monkies, 10 minutes.
Yeah, Phil Collins; Uncaged
OK. So the Complete Works of Shakespeare are out. What about just the sonnets. 
Most of it is unintelligible. Here’s a little bit of it:
(Hope I’m not sued by the macaques for reprinting without permission)
and it just goes on and on like that.
Not much for using the space bar, are they?
Well, its a starts… 
Since monkeys and most humans (me!) obviously can’t/are too lazy to Google, who originated this whole "monkey/typewriter/Shakespeare theory? What is that famous quote from?
Sir Rhosis
WAG: Fred Hoyle?
Okay, let’s see, I’ll type that with hunt-n-peck and see how long it takes (wouldn’t be fair to the monkeys who didn’t take any keyboarding classes.)
To be or not to be, that is the question.
18 seconds in a conservative hunt-n-peck typing method, monkey style. So each monkey could type the requisite number of characters roughly 3 times per minute. That’s 1,576,800 times per year. That’s 1.58 x 10^5. If the monkey types the sentence successfully every 4.04 x 10^83 times, then the odds of a single monkey typing that sentence over the course of a year are 1 in 2.56 x 10^78. So a million monkeys combined writing power over the course of a year would yield 1 in 2.56 x 10^72 odds. Given a million years, that monkey group has 1 in 2.56 x 10^66 odds.
But why demand that specific sentence? From the above calculations, we can deduce that any sentence consisting of a 40-char string will have those odds of being typed. How many coherent sentences in one of Earth’s languages can be represented in a 40-char string? Probably millions and millions, so the odds of coherent monkey-typing aren’t as bleak as you paint them.
Furthermore, why give the monkeys a 104 key board if all we want is English literature? For that, all they need are the 26 letters of the alphabet plus a space bar, and let’s excuse them from capitalization and punctuation, the monkey editors can add that later. That’s 27 keys, only a quarter of what you gave them. So the odds of the million monkey/years group typing your 40-char string are at least 4 times better for each character in the string on the modified keyboard, plus the fact that they don’t have to hit the shift key, or the comma.
So, a single monkey has a (1/27)^16 chance of typing “alas poor yorick” on a modified alpha keyboard. That’s 1.25 x 10^-23, or 1 in 7.97 x 10^22. That works out to a 1 in 50,587 chance that the monkeys will produce “alas poor yorick” given a million years and a million monkeys. That’s assuming a monkey who takes 20 seconds to type that sentence. He has an almost equal chance of typing “i am dead horatio”, or “my cake is dough” (Shrew), or “I am Sir Oracle” (Merchant), and a pretty darn good chance of typing “the fair ophelia”. If you add up all the brief Bard quotes, I’m pretty sure you’d be almost certain to get at least one from a million monkeys, over a million years, on modified alpha keyboards.
“It was the best of times, it was the … blurst of times? Blasted monkeys! Can’t they be relied on for anything?”
The monkeys-with-typewriters thing is usually attributed to 19th century evolution advocate T.H. Huxley, but there’s no evidence he ever said it, and the basic concept goes back way before Huxley (or even Shakespeare). See:
The answer lies in a thread in MPSIMS with a dozen or so 'S’es as its title.
Sort of on-topic, I recall reading an SF story that featured these monkeys typing, and the final line dealt with a faulty keyboard. They had typed everything except one word, and the frustrated monkey typed something like “Goddammit, the g is sticking!”
Sir Rhosis
It looks like they ended the experiment just as the monkeys were getting somewhere. One of the last things they typed is
Maybe it’s not Shakespeare yet, but they were definitely making progress.
^^^Indeed, I believe the monkeys were getting ready to type that old bathroom wall favorite: “The mass of the ass plus the angle of the dangle equals the scream of the cream.”
If only the experiment had continued…
Sir Rhosis
But don’t more words in the English language start with ‘S’ than any other letter? So wouldn’t this indicate that English is their first language?
My co-worker and I use “chimp-hours” as the unit of measurement for judging the quality of someone’s writing. I decent slogan for a new line of shampoo/conditioners, for example, is about 100 chimp-hours.
Been a Long Time by the late, great R. A. Lafferty.
It was the first thing I thought of, too!
“It was the best of times, it was the…Burst of times?!”
Hits a nearby, ciggerrette smoking monkey
“Ford, there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.”