Comedy Dialogue of the Week

[singlepic=21,320,240,,right]On of the most wonderful bits of comedy dialogue I’ve ever come across is the wonderfully constructed Monty Python sketch by Eric Idle, Travel Agent.

While the best interpretation of this is probably the live version (most notably the one performed at The Hollywood Bowl) the version in the second series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus is perfectly good. It concerns a potential tourist, Mr Smoketoomuch, (Eric Idle as a man who cannot pronounce the letter “c”) which enters a travel agent’s and embarks on a superbly frank monologue about foreign holidays. Despite being recorded in 1970, it seems nothing has changed…

Essentially a two hander, Mr Bounder is the travel agent, played by Michael Palin. The following exchange is particularly memorable:

Tourist: Yes I quite agree with you, I mean what’s the point of being treated like a sheep, I mean I’m fed up with going abroad and being treated like a sheep, what’s the point of being carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Boventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their ‘Sunday Mirrors’, complaining about the tea, ‘Oh they don’t make it properly here do they not like at home’ stopping at Majorcan bodegas, selling fish and chips and Watney’s Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in cotton sun frocks squirting Timothy White’s suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh cos they ‘overdid it on the first day’!

Bounder (agreeing patiently:) Yes. Absolutely, yes, I quite agree…

Tourist: And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Bontinentals with their international luxury modern roomettes and their Watney’s Red Barrel and their swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they’re acrobats and forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging in to the queues and if you’re not at your table spot on seven you miss your bowl of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night there’s a bloody cabaret in the bar featuring some tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some big fat bloated tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners.

Bounder (beginning to get fed up:) Yes, yes, now…

Tourist: And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with diarrhoea and flabby white legs and hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel, and then, once a week there’s an excursion to the local Roman ruins where you can buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleedin’ Watney’s Red Barrel, and one night they take you to a local restaurant with local colour and colouring and they show you there and you sit next to a party of people from Rhyl who keeps singing ‘Torremolinos, Torremolinos’ and complaining about the food – ‘Oh! It’s so greasy isn’t it?’ and then you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic and Dr Scholl sandals and last Tuesday’s ‘Daily Express’ and he drones on and on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up all over the Cuba Libres.

Bounder: Will you be quiet please.

Tourist: And sending tinted postcards of places they don’t know they haven’t even visited, ‘to all at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an “X”. Wish you were here.

They don’t write them like this anymore.