Monty Python’s Flying Circus Still Dictates What Comedy Is Allowed to Do

Monty Python’s Flying Circus does not end its sketches so much as abandon them. The BBC series premiered on 5 October 1969 and ran four series until 5 December 1974, and in that time it never once agreed to deliver a punchline.

The show was created by Ian MacNaughton and John Howard Davies for BBC One. Its stars and writers were Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam. They called themselves the Pythons. The show they made does not behave like a sketch show, and that is the whole point.

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Six Men and a Man in a Dinner Jacket

The format owes more to Spike Milligan’s Q… than to any traditional revue. Sketches end without punchlines, or end mid-sentence, or get interrupted by something else entirely. Gilliam’s animations cut into the live action and sometimes merge with it, so a drawing becomes a set and a set becomes a drawing.

For the first three series, Cleese appears in a dinner jacket to open the show with “And Now for Something Completely Different.” Then Palin, long-haired, runs at the camera and says “It’s…” and the episode begins. The theme is John Philip Sousa’s The Liberty Bell march, performed by the Band of the Grenadier Guards. Gilliam picked it because the 1893 march had fallen into the public domain under the Berne Convention and United States copyright law, so the BBC owed no royalty on it. A cheap joke, legally cleared.

The cast is small on purpose. Chapman, Palin, Jones, Idle and Gilliam are credited as “Various.” Around the six worked Carol Cleveland, whom the team called the unofficial “Seventh Python,” Connie Booth, producer Ian MacNaughton, Ian Davidson, musician Neil Innes, and Fred Tomlinson and the Fred Tomlinson Singers for the musical numbers.

A Running Order That Refuses to Run

The show’s structure is best understood as a list of things that should not follow each other:

That table is the honest shape of an episode. There is no regular format to describe, because the programme does not adhere to one.

A feature film of several sketches, And Now for Something Completely Different, followed in 1971. Two further episodes were made for German television.

What Actually Holds Up

The absurdity is the selling point, but the discipline is what makes it last. Six performers covering almost every role means the show never depends on a guest or a set piece it cannot afford. The risqué material and the innuendo land harder because the surrounding sketches are so dry. The observational sketches work because nobody bothers to resolve them.

Gilliam’s animations do more than decorate. They are the show’s connective tissue, and they let an episode change subject without asking permission. That is a structural invention, not a gag, and it is the reason the series still feels unlike anything made for television since. The Pythons met through university before this; the chemistry on screen reads as six people who already knew how to waste each other’s time productively.

The weakness is real. Without punchlines, some sketches simply stop, and a viewer who wants a payoff gets nothing. The dinner-jacket opening and the running “It’s” man are rituals, and rituals get thin across four series.

Still, the hit rate is extraordinary for a show this strange, and the strangeness was never a stunt. It was the method.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus earns its place as the template for sketch comedy that refuses to close a door behind itself. The animations, the missing punchlines and the six-man cast are not quirks to forgive. They are the architecture.

BBC · British comedy · John Cleese · Monty Python · Sketch Comedy · Terry Gilliam