The Best Monty Python Episode Ever

Yep. I went there.

The humble writer is fully aware that he has stepped into the lion’s den. “You can’t call that episode the best episode!” Python fans will scream. “What about — every other episode?!”

It gets worse. The episode in question has none of the material we’ve seen reprised in the live shows. None of the funny Eric Idle songs are played. None of the sketches are particularly quotable, and they only produced one meme-able moment. They never even put any of these bits on the albums.

But the show weaved the silliness, the stream-of-consciousness, and the sketch genius into a complex mosaic that gives us the best example of this great troupe at the height of their skill. And then it goes further still.

You’ve waited long enough. The best episode is Episode 38, “The War Against Pornography”.

First, a preposterously ambitious filmed “Expedition to Lake Pahoe”, gives us their dizzying complexity. Numerous comedic streams intersect, part, come back together. John Cleese’s Interviewer, attempting to narrate the expedition, steps in a bear trap. Moments later, he continues the interview, but has a wooden peg leg. Thereafter, whenever the camera cuts back to him, he looks and acts increasingly like Long John Silver, until he is taken out with a tranquilizer dart. Terry Jones replaces him — and a parrot appears on his shoulder, muttering “Pieces of Eight!”

That’s just one stream. We didn’t get to the stoned naval officers named after 50s film starlets, and the Robert Crumb inspired animated promotional video for the Royal Navy, “something other than else!” And the sketch hasn’t properly started yet. It takes Vice Admiral Graham Chapman (“Stop being silly!”) to get this beautiful mess on track, while covering up the cannibalism in the lower ranks. Yet another stream.

They find Lake Pahoe in the middle of London, in a basement apartment. In a tank decorated as a living room, Chapman and Palin swim around with scuba gear and regular clothes. (Chapman’s regular clothes — a flower print dress. Not easy to swim in.) When asked if this is Lake Pahoe, Chapman replies “I don’t know about that, but it’s bleeding damp!” They deal with sharks the way you and I deal with roaches.

All of these brilliant ideas get tossed into this absurdist casserole. But the ingredients are exotic and counter-intuitive. It can be an acquired taste. The sketch requires a couple of views to really develop an appreciation.

Not all of the sketches are quite so challenging. This is also the episode where Gumby Palin walks into a Gumby Cleese doctor’s office for brain surgery. “My brain hurts!” (The meme.) Cleese and Palin doing a Gumby-off is a sheer delight, and one of the few times where you actually see Palin crack up, as Cleese checks Palin’s pants for his brain. “No! No!,” Palin protests. “My brain in my head!” Gilliam brings a great animated bit into the show — a baby that can suck in an entire room full of people, and the only thing standing between them and consumption is the baby’s pacifier.

However, in this episode, they do what Monty Python swears to this day they never did — they got topical.

For the show’s first two years, they were given full creative freedom, which is a polite way of saying that they were ignored. But as their show grew in popularity and influence, mudsticks began to appear. The most infamous of these was Mary Whitehouse, a conservative running a grassroots pressure campaign against the BBC to bring decency back to television. Monty Python was a frequent target. Apparently she thought dining on one’s own dead mother instead of burying her was indecent? She must have loved the cannibalism in the Navy sketch.

This had two negative effects on Monty Python. First, it created a subculture of anti-fans, folks who not only didn’t watch the show, but didn’t want anyone to watch the show, and deemed its creators a threat to society. Idle tells a story of shooting somewhere in London. An older lady asked what the shoot was for, and when Idle told her, she scowled at him. “Oh, Monty Python. I hate you lot.” Although Idle looks back fondly on that exchange, decades before the blinkered adoration they now receive, it shows us that silliness had managed to become controversial.

Second, the BBC censors stopped ignoring Monty Python, and for the third season and fourth season, required script approval before the shows were shot. Some of the demanded edits were ridiculous, such as insisting that a voice over in a Gilliam animation be changed to replace the word “cancer” with “gangrene.” Is cancer indecent? Is gangrene less so?

While Python famously tried to stay out of politics and more topical humor, this was clearly something that irritated them. That irritation seeped into the comedy they were writing, and much of it wound up in this episode.

First, Idle’s revenge on that dotty old lady. With satire. A documentary about housewives cleaning up Britain, in the style of a WW2 propaganda film, starts off the show. The Pepperpots scowl at the camera as they denounce the permissive society, Hegelianism, and Shakespeare. And where do they stand on young people? The neck. By the end, they are firing machine guns, throwing bombs and driving tanks.

Later, Palin bites the cowardice and commodification of the BBC. He plays a TV news announcer, then swerves from genre to genre, the news turning into drama, to home improvement, to documentary. Idle takes over, going from politics to children’s stories. Gilliam jumps in, the now animated children’s story morphing into a financial show, and back to children’s story. Jones steps in, changes the children’s show to a political commentary, to a religious program, then headbutts a soccer ball. It’s a great bit that underscores the banality of TV and how formats reduce content to interchangeable cogs of content.

And of course, the soccer ball takes us to film of a soccer team celebrating, men hugging… and kissing… and rolling around on the ground together. Mary Whitehouse should be pleased, though — none of them said “Cancer.”

But my favorite bit in the episode is Cleese as a door-to-door television documentary. He carries his TV cut-out into random homes, sits behind it in their living room, and presents a documentary on molluscs.

He doesn’t have to wait for the overnight ratings. He can see, in real time, that molluscs are boring his audience. When the Mr. and Mrs. (Jones and Chapman, respectively) try to turn him off because he’s boring, he protests “Well, it’s not much of a subject. Be fair.” They give him another twenty seconds; the pressure is on! How can Cleese save this presentation?

Just as his time elapses, he is struck with inspiration. “However, what is more interesting is the mollusc’s… sex life!” This stops Jones and Chapman in their tracks. What follows is a great juxtaposition of science and prurient descriptions of mollusc sex, Cleese going full thesaurus on us. “The mollusc is a randy little fellow…” “This tatty, scrofulous old rapist…” “A bed-hopping firm-breasted, Rabelaisian bit of seafood…” Things come to a head when he gets to the whelk — “a homosexual of the worst kind… this screaming, prancing limp-wristed queen of the deep makes me sick!”

Now — let’s move past the hate speech for a moment, remembering charitably that this was a different time with a greater tolerance for hurtful stereotypes. Instead, let’s focus on the genius of this sketch as a rejoinder to Mary Whitehouse and her censorship campaigns.

First, Cleese posits, the issue with offensive material on television often has less to do with the questionable taste of the creators, and more to do with the salacious audience. Sex does indeed sell, and blaming that on the content creators ignores a deeper problem with responsible viewership. What we see on television is a mirror of societal demands, just one part of the conversation between writers and viewers. We don’t get a soapbox for this speech — just a lot of fun bubbles.

Second, Cleese prophetically suggests that television can easily tap into the uglier passions that lurk within the audience. After working up his little audience into a froth of hatred towards the whelk, he then produces one, and they stomp it into bits. Once the moment has passed, there is an awkward handshake, like a post-coital “Do you have a towel?” conversation.

Idle satirized the bastions of censorship, and Palin criticized the blandness of television. This sketch goes much deeper, pointing the finger at both viewer and performer. “We both are terrible,” he suggests, “and we should both be better.” And all of this in what is essentially a silly, absurdist sketch.

Cleese didn’t want to do a third season of Monty Python. He believed that they were repeating themselves. But this sketch, and this episode, puts the lie to that. I’m very grateful that he stuck it out. He and Monty Python gave us the best episode of the best sketch comedy show ever.