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"The Ministry of Silly Walks" is a sketch from the Monty Python comedy troupe's television show Monty Python's Flying Circus, episode 14, which is entitled "Face the Press". The episode first aired in 1970. A shortened version of the sketch was performed for Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl. This sketch involves John Cleese as a bowler hatted civil servant in a fictitious British government ministry responsible for developing Silly Walks through grants. Cleese, throughout the sketch, walks in a variety of silly ways (including one that briefly imitates the scissor gait of spastic diplegia), and it is these various silly walks, more than the dialogue, that has earned the sketch its popularity. Cleese has cited the physical comedy of Max Wall, probably in character as Professor Wallofski, as important to its conception.
The Sketch
Cleese is presented with a "walk in progress" by one Mr. Putey (Michael Palin) — a walk which turns out to be actually not that silly. He tells Putey that he does not believe the Ministry can help him, as his walk is not silly enough, and funding is short. The government, he explains, is supposed to give equally to Defence, Social Security, Health, Housing, Education and Silly Walks, but recently has been underfunding Silly Walks. Cleese later offers Mr. Putey a grant that will allow him to work on the Anglo-French Silly Walk, La Marche Futile (an obvious parody of the Concorde's Anglo-French development), illustrated with some particularly ludicrous walk motions by Cleese, who is clearly reveling in the prospect of the Anglo-French project's taking place.
There is a brief appearance by Mrs Twolumps serving coffee with full silly walk (Carol Cleveland in the Hollywood Bowl version). The result of her style of walking is that no coffee is left in the cups by the time she puts them down on the desk. In the Hollywood Bowl version, Carol Cleveland accidentally (or possibly intentionally) hops next to Cleese and spills some of the coffee on him during the sketch.
As the years went by amid repeated requests to do the sketch, Cleese found it increasingly difficult to perform these walks. He'd say, when told about a new Python Tour, "I'm not doing silly walks."
Some right-wing inspired observers claimed to see in this sketch a satire of government projects. But it should be noted that in the book The Pythons, members of the troupe indicated that they considered the whole scene nothing more than pure silliness. Cleese in particular seems discouraged that so many fans consider it the troupe's "best" sketch.
John Hopkins, Cleese's former Director of Studies at Downing College, Cambridge, has suggested that the inspiration for the sketch came as a result of Cleese's time studying there, where the uneven, slippery and ill-supported gravel paths of the college domus often force undergraduates to navigate carefully around frequently-formed puddles and pot-holes with an amusing, broad and 'silly' stride[citation needed]. However, this explanation is highly unlikely, as the sketch was written by Terry Jones and Michael Palin, who were educated at Oxford University.
Chapter 5 of G. K. Chesterton's 1904 work The Club of Queer Trades may be a source for this sketch. Titled "The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd," the chapter describes the sudden, odd behaviour of an ethnologist who is an "authority on the relations of savages to language." Professor Chadd refuses to speak to anyone and will only hop and dance around in his garden, kicking his legs in a fantastic manner, convincing his household that he has gone mad. In fact, as Basil Grant, the hero of the book deduces, Chadd has invented a new language expressed through dance. Grant then arranges for the government to pay Chadd a research endowment of 800 pounds per year until his new language can be decoded.
