Monty Python's Flying Circus / YMMV

Adaptation Displacement: An example of a show doing it to itself, some of Flying Circus' bits were redone, and became famous the second time around.
- Graham Chapman played the first Gumby, but Michael Palin created the one everyone remembers.
- Terry Gilliam played a nude organist for the televised version of the "Blackmail" sketch. A crazy-haired Terry Jones replaced him in the recreation filmed for And Now for Something Completely Different, and the rest is history.
- Graham Chapman's colonel who complained about things getting too silly was preceded by Graham Chapman's colonel who complained about copyright violations of the British Army's slogan "It's a dog's— pig's— man's life, in the modern army". The transition came in the episode "Full Frontal Nudity", where the Colonel begins a sketch in his first role — admonishing a soldier who thought from the British Army's recruitment campaign it was all about water-skiing and other adventures rather than killing — and then breaks the fourth wall with "Stop that, it's silly" when the sketch turns into a gag about two Mafia men intimidating him for menaces money. He then reappears throughout that episode (and ever afterward) to stop sketches he considers silly, and the earlier characterization was abandoned.
- And of course there's "And Now For Something Completely Different", which was displaced from another show, Blue Peter; it was also spoken by Eric Idle and Michael Palin before John Cleese used it.
- Certain sketches fall under this as well. The Four Yorkshiremen sketch was originally written and performed for At Last the 1948 Show, but the Pythons (two of whom, Chapman and Cleese, had been a part of said show) began performing it in their live stage shows, including on Monty Python Live at Drury Lane and Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl leading to its association with the Flying Circus. The "Job Interview" sketch had originally been written by Cleese as part of a 1968 American television special, How to Irritate People (also featuring Chapman and Palin); Cleese's 1948 co-star Tim Brooke-Taylor played Chapman's interviewee role. It's worth noting the same special also introduced us to the Pepperpots.
- Some people don't even know there was a TV show, knowing the Pythons from the movies.
Alternate Character Interpretation: The Gestapo officer who insisted the Funniest Joke in the World wasn’t funny before bursting out laughing; was he trying to stop himself from laughing, or was he Late to the Punchline?
Aluminum Christmas Trees:
- One sketch has two gangsters barge into the Colonel's office and demand protection money so that his military base doesn't have "an accident." It's pretty ridiculous that gangsters would think they can push around a nation's military, but "Lucky" Luciano is believed to have done just that. During World War II, the incarcerated Luciano offered the Mafia's help in protecting America's docks from Axis sabotage in return for his freedom. The government actually accepted the deal. It's been suspected that Luciano had simply played a standard protection racket on his own nation, and any "Axis sabotage" that had occurred was done by Luciano's men themselves.
- The "Working-Class Playwright" sketch is based on the real phenomenon of writers from working-class backgrounds finding success in postwar Britain: David Storey, whose novel This Sporting Life was made into a film starring Richard Harris, is a good example inasmuch as his dad was an actual coalminer. The playwright David Mercer was the son of an engine driver, the father of the novelist Alan Sillitoe worked in the Raleigh bicycle factory, etc.
- The "Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook" sketch has real world precedence in a Portuguese-English phrasebook published originally in 1855. It is believed to have been created through a Portuguese-French phrasebook translated with a French-English dictionary by an author who did not speak English. The result is something Mark Twain considered wonderful absurdist comedy.
And You Thought It Would Fail:
- While filming a sketch in Folkstone Harbor, John Cleese became seasick and threw up repeatedly. During the ride back, Graham Chapman, trained as a doctor, said he should eat something, and Cleese replied that he fancied some cheese. They came across a chemist's shop, which Cleese wondered about asking for cheese there, and this eventually evolved into a sketch about someone asking for cheese in a cheese shop which had no cheese whatsoever. However, Cleese initially did not think the sketch was funny while writing it, despite Chapman's insistence. When it was presented to the other Pythons, they were equally unimpressed...until Michael Palin laughed so hard he fell out of his chair.
- The initial attempts to bring the show across The Pond met with this, as American TV executives believed British humour would go right over the heads of American TV audiences. Then Monty Python and the Holy Grail turned out to be a surprise cult hit in America. KERA, a PBS station in Dallas, Texas, began airing the show, and it became a hit with younger viewers, giving the fledgling network a hip countercultural cachet. The series soon spread by word of mouth to other PBS stations around the country, with reruns becoming a staple of PBS programming for many years.
- Before the series aired, Cleese's mother sent him job adverts for supermarket managers.
Crosses the Line Twice: Many times, most notably with two sketches involving cannibalism.
- The "Sam Peckinpah's Salad Days" sketch, which takes Ludicrous Gibs to even more ludicrous levels. Unsurprisingly, given it contains (literal) fountains of gore resulting from people getting dismembered, being impaled on tennis rackets and having their hands ripped off by a piano keyboard cover closing on them, it generated large numbers of complaints.
- "Undertakers Sketch", the final sketch of series 2, also pushes the envelope of tastelessness in classic Graham Chapman style. The sketch features a discussion between an undertaker and a customer of how to dispose of the latter's mother's corpse, to the sounds of an increasingly vocal shocked and disgusted audience, who storm the stage after the notorious final line.
  Undertaker: Look, we'll eat your mum. Then, if you feel a bit guilty about it afterwards, we can dig a grave and you can throw up into it.
- The thing that clinched the sketch as this trope is that the invasion of the stage was itself arranged to get this sketch past the BBC censor, who felt that only the implicit apology of the apparent audience revolt would make it acceptable. It's also noticeable in the film that only about 50% of the audience had been enlisted to boo and invade the stage - the rest are clearly seen laughing.
- "Undertakers Sketch" was mentioned by John Cleese during Chapman's eulogy, which itself massively pushes the bounds of taste in homage to Chapman, who Cleese described during it as the "prince of bad taste".
  Cleese: Graham Chapman, co-author of the 'Parrot Sketch,' is no more. He has ceased to be, bereft of life, he rests in peace, he has kicked the bucket, hopped the twig, bit the dust, snuffed it, breathed his last, and gone to meet the Great Head of Light Entertainment in the sky. And I guess that we're all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, of such capability for kindness, for such unusual intelligence, a man who could overcome his alcoholism with such truly admirable single-mindedness, should now so suddenly be spirited away at the age of only forty-eight before he'd achieved many of the things in which he was capable, and before he'd had enough fun. Well, I feel that I should say: nonsense. Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard, I hope he fries. And the reason I feel I should say this is he would never forgive me if I didn't. If I threw away this glorious opportunity to shock you all on his behalf. Anything, for him, except mindless good taste.
- "Never Be Rude to an Arab".
- In case the name didn't tip you off, the "Mr and Mrs Niggerbaiter" sketch.
- Speaking of the dead parrot sketch, Cleese has said they made sure to use an animal that "everyone hates," as otherwise the audience would feel sorry for it.
- "Hospital Run by RSM," in which the hospital is run like a boot camp, when its trauma patients aren't being used for cheap labor.
- From "The Attila the Hun Show", Eric Idle plays a traditional sit-com butler in black-face. It would be extremely racist if it wasn't completely over-the-top and skewering the usual stereotypes associated with it.
- One of the Gumbys is blown up in "How Not to be Seen", yet when the smoke clears his boots are still standing together.
Genius Bonus: All over the place. One DVD box set lampshades this, saying that the series is a complete university education in a box.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
- Which is why Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus came about, made especially for the show's sizeable German fanbase.
- The series became a surprise hit in Japan; in 1976, it was the most-watched show in the country.
- After the series ended, it became a staple of PBS stations across The Pond coming off the popularity of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Harsher in Hindsight:
- Eric Idle's character in "The Architect Sketch" presents a model of a high-rise apartment that catches fire mid-speech.^note The planners approve it anyway. A hilarious show of ineptitude? Maybe. But in the wake of the Grenfell disaster...
- The "School Prize-Giving" sketch isn't quite so funny in the wake of several recent school shootings in America.
- The sight of hijackers (albeit very polite ones) repeatedly forcing open the door of an airliner cockpit can come across differently in today's world.
- The "Silly Olympics" has a swimming race for non-swimmers, which ends with the comment, "We'll be back as soon as we get the bodies out of the pool." The actual Olympics that year were in Munich, where eleven Israeli athletes, coaches and officials were killed by terrorists.
- While still funny, the Self Defense Against Fruit Sketch is somewhat eerie when you realize the Pythons seem to be killed off in the order in which they have died in real life (Graham Chapman followed by Terry Jones, leaving the four remaining ones).^note
- "The Funniest Joke In The World" sketch, about a joke that is so funny, it causes anyone who heard it to Die Laughing. In 1989, Danish audiologist Ole Bentzen died while watching A Fish Called Wanda (which featured John Cleese and Michael Palin and was co-directed and co-written by the former). He found the film so funny, he laughed so hard that it caused his heart to beat rapidly (at 500 beats per minute) before it suddenly stopped.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- "The Mouse Problem" satirized then-current attitudes of homosexuality by replacing homosexuals with men who dress up like mice; today, we now have fursuiters.
- "The Cycling Tour," starring Michael Palin, parodies presciently the same travelogues he would be famous for decades later.
  - Also from that same episode, "So it was all a dream." "No, this is the dream, you are back in the cell."
- Also the Whicker's World parody. Palin's first travelogue series, Around The World in 80 Days, was originally intended for Alan Whicker.
- In "The Science Fiction Sketch", they mention how Scotland is the worst tennis-playing nation on Earth, but a Scotsman saves the day by winning Wimbledon. In 2013, Scotsman Andy Murray won Wimbledon. The same sketch features a Mr. and Mrs. Harold Potter.
- The "Poet McTeagle" sketch featured a poet who did nothing but beg for money. Now we have Kickstarter, which is essentially creative people begging for money.
- The "Germany vs. Greece Football Match" ends with Socrates realizing that the philosophers are in a football match, dribbling the ball to Germany's goal, and scoring the only goal in the match. Later, in the 1980s, there was a player on the Brazilian World Cup team named Socrates.
- Douglas Adams appeared in Episode 42.
- The idea of the "Wee-wee Wines" sketch i.e. urine being passed off as fancy wine, was nixed by either BBC management or John Cleese, depending on who you ask. This exact joke finally was aired in the Blackadder II episode "Potato".
- During the "Court Scene (Charades)" sketch in Episode 15 ("The Spanish Inquisition"), John Cleese as the QC (i.e. prosecutor) mistakenly calls for Exhibit Q. In 2002, Cleese would play the character Q in the 007 film Die Another Day.
- One of the subsidiaries of Confuse-A-Cat Ltd. is called "Bewilderebeest" - a term that means something very different to How to Train Your Dragon 2 fans than the simple act of bewildering a wildebeest.
- One of the incontinent marathoners is named Ian McKellen.^note
- In the "Communist Quiz" sketch, the quizmaster asks Che Guevara when Coventry City last won the FA Cup, and then throws the question to the rest of the panel. When no-one answers (Communist philosophers and politicians not having much time to follow English football), he reveals that it was a trick question: Coventry City have never won the FA Cup. The sketch aired in 1970; in 1987, Coventry City won the FA Cup, making re-runs of the sketch highly amusing to Sky Blues fans.^note
- The "Lumberjack Song" features a Lumberjack who's into crossdressing. Later on, Fate/Grand Order features a Gender Flip of one of the most known lumberjacks in stories, Paul Bunyan, as a Berserker-type servant.
- A skit in the fourth ASDF Movie has a banana wielder get shot through the face by a man he challenges to a banana fight. Someone's been taking the right self-defense lessons and not wasting time on pointed sticks.
- "The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights" — or, Wuthering Heights with plenty of arm waving.
- One sketch saw Eric Idle as an intensely narcissistic television personality named Timmy Williams. Decades later, a real-life (and very much not narcissistic) actor named Timmy Williams would become well-known in the world of sketch comedy as a member of The Whitest Kids U' Know.
- "Bicycle Repairman" is a Superman parody. In 2004, John Cleese wrote the comic book, Superman: True Brit.
- One of the impossible tasks Ron Obvious is made to carry out is jumping over the English Channel. A decade later, a man named Bryan Allen managed to do just that (from a certain point of view) with a bicycle.
- Meta version: the Pythons themselves were afraid of getting sued by DC Comics for the Bicycle Repairman sketch because of the use of everyone as Superman. They almost were sued... by Alan Whicker over the parody in the "Whicker's World" sketch almost twenty-four episodes later.
- Whenever John Cleese puts on a fake mustache, it would look very similar to the one he would sport in his later years.
I Am Not Shazam: Nobody involved with the show was actually named "Monty Python." The name was chosen at random.
Informed Wrongness: The narrator of the "Mr. Neutron" sketch keeps telling us that Mr. Neutron is plotting to destroy the world, yet we never see Mr. Neutron do anything even remotely evil, except flirting with a married woman, and is a pretty nice (if odd) guy.
It Was His Sled: Their "Spanish Inquisition" sketch has become such a classic that it's now easy to forget what made it so funny the first time it showed up: it was (hence their catchphrase) completely unexpected, with the Inquisition barging into an unrelated sketch without warning^note. Needless to say, watching it in a YouTube video titled "The Spanish Inquisition" spoils the joke just a bit. One wonders why the people uploading such videos don't retitle them after the sketches they were interrupting (i.e. "Trouble at t'Mill", and "Pictures of Uncle Ted") to avoid this.
Memetic Mutation: Now with its own page.
Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: The famous "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" sketch has been presented by Spaniards as a prime example of the Spanish Black Legend in pop culture, but the truth is that even those often cannot help but find it hilarious and very quotable.
Misaimed Fandom:
- The Pythons were dismayed that people were looking for deeper satirical meaning in the "Ministry of Silly Walks", which they said was just a silly sketch; John Cleese focused on fans who thought the sketch was their best.
- The opposite happened with Monty Python's Life of Brian, where the Pythons really were parodying the divisions in Britain's left-wing parties.
Older Than They Think: "The Liberty Bell" by John Philip Sousa has been associated with the Pythons ever since that composition was used as the theme song, to the point where laypeople tend to forget that it was originally an American military march.
Parody Displacement:
- Numerous bits of British pop culture are known in the US mainly because they were spoofed here, like Biggles and Pantomime. American fans have been known to regard things like that as Aluminum Christmas Trees.
- Due to the memetic status of "The Spanish Inquisition", "I didn't come here expecting the Spanish Inquisition" is often erroneously thought to be a phrase invented by the Monty Python themselves. It's actually an older, not uncommon at the time, way of expressing annoyance to someone else's questioning.
Quirky Work: The series established the U.K.'s reputation as a purveyor of weird comedy thanks to its anarchic approach. This is especially the case outside the UK, thanks to the show relying so heavily on satirizing contemporary British society that many of the jokes are lost on international audiences, who instead focus on the surrealist and absurdist elements.
Retroactive Recognition: Several of the female roles are played by Connie Booth who would later be best known for playing Polly Sherman in Fawlty Towers.
Seasonal Rot: The fourth and final series is widely considered to be the weakest one. The Pythons themselves share this viewpoint; John Cleese, having become tired with the show, had left after the previous series and they agree that without both his contributions and his quality control, things were getting a bit weaker. When the show was added to Netflix, it took the unusual step of showing the series in reverse chronological order, with the fourth series first, perhaps to avoid it being anti-climactic for binge watchers.
Once Original, Now Common: Hearing people recite their favourite sketches for the 16,047th time can be aggravating, to say the least - especially since the creator's aim was to make a show that is completely unpredictable.
Special Effect Failure: "Salad Days" features several, such as John Cleese's "hands" being blatantly severed before the piano cover gets smashed on them, and the woman whose head is knocked off by a piano keyboard clearly being a mannequin. This only adds to the humour, and was probably intentional (in addition, there were obviously budget constraints as well).
Unintentional Period Piece: While the majority of the Pythons' humour is pretty damn ageless, some of the jokes will fly over your head if you aren't familiar with British television presenters, celebrities and politicians who were around at the time. You might get a joke about a "Mrs. Thatcher", "Mr. (Harold) Wilson", and "Mr. (Edward) Heath", but unless you're well-versed in British culture, you probably won't know who Robin Day was (except that he owned a hedgehog called Frank) or realize that the Piranha Brothers sketch was satirizing the Kray twins. Some sketches parody aspects of British bureaucracy that are no longer around - for example the 'Fish License' sketch is based around dog licenses which were abolished in 1987. "Appearing on the M2" are many Vauxhall Vivas - a brand of car long disappeared from the United Kingdom. On top of that, the costuming and hairstyles on the series are pretty definitively '60s-'70s, albeit in a fairly low-key way... except when actual women are involved.
- Probably the most notable thing pegging Python to its time is its use of traditional currency - shillings, sixpence, etc. - in the first two series; Britain did not decimalise its currency until 1971, so pre-decimal money shows up from time to time, like in the "Embezzler Accountant" sketch as well as the "New Television Licenses" end credit background. One third-series sketch included an onscreen note, "Old Sketch written before decimalisation" and helpfully provided conversions, which probably counts as Lampshade Hanging.
- Their The Bishop sketch is a parody of The Saint, but most younger generations don't remember this show anymore.
- In the first season there was a sketch where some hippies have taken custody of a man's stomach (and claim squatters' rights), which is discovered during his operation.
- Frequent references to communist uprisings and Maoism, actors appearing in Brown Face or Yellow Face for gags, direct references to the BBC globe spinning around during programmes (something the BBC abandoned in 1997)...
- Some sketches refer to the then African country of Rhodesia, which has since become part of Zimbabwe.
Values Dissonance: The Pythons' portrayal of female, LGBT+, and non-white characters is often rather offensive when viewed today, including instances of Japanese Ranguage, blackface, and other stereotypical depictions that can jar viewers more used to the films. The show's handling of gay characters may be mitigated somewhat by the fact that Graham Chapman himself was openly gay and a strong supporter of LGBT+ rights, though sketches like "The Lumberjack Song" and its depiction of its lead character, a man who reveals he wants to be a woman during the titular song and is scorned by everyone around him, are still somewhat discomforting to current-day audiences.

YMMV / Monty Python's Flying Circus

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