"The Ministry of Silly Walks" is a sketch from the Monty Python comedy troupe's television show Monty Python's Flying Circus, series 2, episode 1, which is entitled "Face the Press". The episode first aired on 15 September 1970. A shortened version of the sketch was performed for Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl.
A satire on bureaucratic inefficiency, the 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. It is these various silly walks, more than the dialogue, that have 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.
Ben Beaumont-Thomas in The Guardian writes, "Cleese is utterly deadpan as he takes the stereotypical bowler-hatted political drone and ruthlessly skewers him. All the self-importance, bureaucratic inefficiency and laughable circuitousness of Whitehall is summed up in one balletic extension of his slender leg."[1]
According to research, published in British Medical Journal[2] a 'silly walk' would take about 2.5 times as much energy as normal walking.
- ^ "John Cleese and Mick Jagger are wrong – Monty Python's silly walks are still hilarious". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 August 2019.
- ^ Glenn A. Gaesser, David C. Poole, Siddhartha S. Angadi Quantifying the benefits of inefficient walking: Monty Python inspired laboratory based experimental study BMJ, 21 December 2022.