From Climbing the North Face of the Uxbridge Road:
“Oh, well but they said Crippen was crazy, didn’t they?”
“Crippen was crazy!”
“Oh, well there you are, then.”
…Okay, I know there was a killer doctor named Crippen, but…is this supposed to relate to mountain climbing, somehow, or is it just another silly non-sequitur?
Watching Monty Python try to summarize Marcel Proust’s grand opus Remembrance of Things Past just swept by my head as a kid. Now that I know both that the title in question is seven novels long and also notoriously difficult to read, the scene becomes so much funnier.
Well, not only that, they have a challenge in trying to summarize it in fifteen seconds.
I think that appeared more than once. But I remember it as a line from the Art Critic.
It doesn’t relate to mountain-climbing. People accused of being crazy often invoke other people accused of being crazy who were vindicated by history. Chapman’s character in this sketch just whiffs it really bad. No deeper meaning about it.
The one thing about the joke that I didn’t think worked was that Crippen wasn’t really crazy; he was just an evil prick who killed his wife. Brady and Hindley, now they were crazy.
What about, “A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat?” I didn’t think much of it until I heard Herod say, “A nod’s a good as a wink from that direction” in I, Claudius.
So exactly how is a nod as good as a wink?
The expression is “A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind horse.” I think Eric Idle was just playing around with it a little.
So if I have two winks, I can trade them for two nods? I just want to make sure the nod-to-wink exchange rate is constant.
They’re both trading weakly against the SHLAT (shake of a lamb’s tail). I’d trade my nods for hen’s teeth.
What about two winks and two nudges? Know what I mean, know what I mean? 
nods, winks, shlats, hen’s teeth…! whatever happened to good old flying figs? 
All right, stop it, stop it–this thread is getting entirely too silly!
No,it’s not.
yes, it is.
I came here for a good argument!
An argument is an intellectual process! Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes!
time’s up
A nod and a wink are both ways of saying yes, though with a wink you are being perhaps les overt about it, or perhaps you are saying “I really should not approve, but go ahead and I won’t stop you.” But a blind person (or bat) can see neither, so they mean the same.
The original version is probably, “A wink is as good as a nod.” – that makes a bit more sense, really.
Ahh, you obviously never saw the telecasts hosted by an obviously pissed Terry Wogan.
They are far more fun than the mockery because it’s meant to be serious and professional yet Wogan begins noticably slurring his words by about the 7th act and starts taking the piss himself by about the 12th.
Memorable lines like “Yes, of course, the next act is an Isreali playing Watusi music on a Cherokee trumpet supported by Afghan dancers, makes perfect sense for the Eurovision song contest” and “I have no idea what that was all about but I;m sure it was wonderful” are priceless when they come form a respected broadcaster as part of the offical commentary.