And Now For Something Completely Contrived…A 'Monty Python’s Flying Circus' Retro Recap: 'Sex and Violence'

Written by Joel T. Lewis

Series 1 Episode 2
Sex and Violence
 
Sketch List
Flying Sheep
A Man with Three Buttocks
Musical Mice
Marriage Guidance Counselor
The Wacky Queen
Working Class Playwright
The Wrestling Epilogue
The Mouse Problem
 
 
For the “Sex and Violence” episode of Flying Circus it was difficult to decide which sketch to focus on. The Man with Three Buttocks sketch is an interesting commentary on the faux-conservatism of the media as John Cleese’s show-host is embarrassed to refer to Arthur Frampton’s unique rear-end on air but with the same breath has no hesitation to ask him to pull his trousers down on television. The Wacky Queen sketch has interesting parallels to how we consume and emulate popular culture as technology advances. The assumption would be that if Queen Victoria had been filmed she would have only been filmed with dignified tracking shots whereas in the sketch she (played by Terry Jones) and Prime Minister William Gladstone (played by Graham Chapman) recreate the popular comedy of the time with water hose and fence-painting gags. 

The way the most dignified of figures are portrayed as imitating popular culture in this sketch is very similar to the way we consume and imitate pop culture today. Finally The Mouse Problem sketch is a complex critique of the exposé-style journalism popular in the 60’s that demonized “alternative” lifestyles. By trading mouse for homosexual in this sketch, the Pythons poke fun at the dehumanizing way exposé programs portray their subjects. The premise is silly but the critique is biting. While any one of these sketches would have made for interesting discussion, I decided to examine the very first sketch that Monty Python ever filmed, the Flying Sheep Sketch.

What if sheep were “laboring under the misapprehension that they’re birds?” While the Flying Sheep sketch has a funny enough premise, it is the way the Monty Python team explores “Ovine Aviation” that makes us laugh. The set is minimal, the costumes are basic, and the team provides us very quickly with a setting (a farm), and two characters of differing backgrounds: a local farmer (played by Graham Chapman) and a visiting businessman (played by Terry Jones). The camera does not move and all we are able to see of the sheep attempting to fly comes from the reactions of Jones and Chapman as they discuss and observe the dim-witted creatures imitating birds.

​Not once are we able to see what the characters on screen see, and our imaginations are only fueled by their discussion, the “baa-ing” sounds made off screen in time with the sheep hopping on their back legs, and the heavy “whumping” sounds that indicate a lamb plummeting to the ground. What’s so fascinating about this sketch is that it plays as if it were meant for radio. If you were to turn away from the screen and only listen to the dialogue and sound effects the sketch is still funny. Even the joke the team has set up of the surprisingly well-spoken farmer would not suffer for not having been shown on film as the accents adopted by Jones and Chapman solidly establish their differing backgrounds. Now presenting a radio-sketch on film that is still funny is quite the feat but, it is made all the more interesting when set in contrast to the scene into which it transitions.

The lecture on the advantages of Ovine Aviation presented by John Cleese and Michael Palin relies not on sound, as in the previous scene, but on the visual clues on-screen. There are a few sound effects that Palin and Cleese make that give some clue as to what they are talking about in the lecture, but as the lecture is presented entirely in French, an English speaking audience can get a bit lost. However, the diagram of the sheep (which opens up to reveal an airplane cross-section) provides the audience with a visual context where the French dialogue is rendered intelligible. Also, the sight-gag of the professors needing to wear the fake mustache in order to speak would be lost if this scene had been written for English radio, as the previous one might have been. It is once again with juxtaposition that the Python team elevates a relatively simple premise to a complex commentary on the reliance of one scene on auditory elements for the comedic effect and another’s reliance on the visual gag. The same joke is being made in both scenes, but the humor has a deeper impact as a result of the different comedic tools employed in order to make the same joke twice. 

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