I’ve been watching episodes from the original Monty Python television show (1969-74). The films and the famous sketches are now a familiar part of modern comedy culture, but it’s interesting to go back and look at the original work it all sprang from. The classics are still there of course, together with a fair number of gems that never quite made it beyond the TV episodes and a lot of dross that is probably best left forgotten. One thing that stands out in hindsight is their inability to write for women. Carol Cleveland does the best she can, but she’s basically used as an attractive prop. The guys got dragged up for any more interesting female roles.
I mention all this here because of a particular sketch – Marriage Guidance Counselor. I remember watching this as a young teenager and being strangely and strongly aroused by it. Admittedly, I was a young teenager in the days before internet porn, so the set of things that I found arousing was pretty large. A breeze striking my trouser region at the right angle would have worked, so Carole Cleveland in a low cut top definitely did the trick. However, there were a lot of other sketches featuring her or similarly attractive actresses, and none of those stuck in my mind like this one did. In hindsight, I wonder if the cuckold element resonated with me? It’d weird to think that, because at the time I had zero idea about kink, let along something as complex as cuckolding. Yet perhaps the fundamental idea of sex twisted by betrayal and denial was already lurking in my psyche? Was it a proto-kink waiting to be named and understood? Or was it was just that low cut top all along?
This is the beautiful Carol Cleveland herself, obviously in a non-Python promo shot.
On a tangent: I mod several Facebook and Reddit groups, and to keep out spammers, will sometimes set up questions to be answered in order to be able to post. Recently, I asked as one of the questions “What is the airspeed of a swallow?” and most of the responses were some variant of “I have no idea.” Turns out, a lot of people under 30 or so didn’t get the reference.
Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more, eh?
Well if nothing else, they fail the basic intelligence test of not immediately punching the question into a search engine!
I often use the quote “…and a fanatical allegiance to the pope” at work. It fits nicely to bookmark a debate where me or someone else keeps adding to a list of reasons or attributes. You’ve now got me wondering if all the young developers there are smiling with absolutely no idea what I’m talking about!
-paltego