Monty Python鈥檚 Ministry of 聽sketch has been making audiences laugh for 50 years, and now we have a sense of just how silly its star鈥檚 walking style is. An analysis shows that John Cleese鈥檚 comedic gait is about 6.7 times more variable 鈥� or sillier 鈥� than standard human walking.
To biologists who study the origin and evolution of bipedal walking, the Ministry of Silly Walks television sketch is famous, says Nathaniel Dominy at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. It gives a sense of some of the extreme variation in walking style that is possible in a two-legged hominin.
Dominy says the video is usually played in classes just for laughs, but he and his Dartmouth colleague Erin Butler decided to analyse it properly.
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To quantify the silliness of the walk, the pair focused on how much Cleese鈥檚 knees flexed and extended 鈥� because this was the easiest aspect of his walk to measure in the old footage. Even then, data collection was a challenge. 鈥淐alculating knee joint angles [was difficult] given the low frame rate of the videos and the quickness with which the minister did some of his silliest movements,鈥� says Butler.
Despite these problems, Butler and Dominy showed that Cleese occasionally bent his knees through about 110 degrees as he walked. In normal motion, the knee rarely bends through more than 60 degrees.
It wasn鈥檛 just the extreme angle of knee flexing that made the walk silly. 鈥淛ohn Cleese is flexing and extending his knees at all the wrong times,鈥� says Dominy. For instance, one of his knees bends through 110 degrees at a point where, in normal walking, it should be bent through just 20 degrees.
By quantifying this variation, Butler and Dominy calculated that Cleese鈥檚 walking style in the original sketch was 6.7 times more variable, or sillier, than typical walking. But his gait during a 1980 live performance in Hollywood was just 4.7 times more variable, suggesting his walk lost some of its silliness with the passing of time.
In the 1970 sketch, Cleese鈥檚 minister assesses the silly walk of a second character named Mr Pudey. He points out that Mr Pudey鈥檚 effort was 鈥渘ot particularly silly鈥� but still awards him a research fellowship to develop its silliness. Butler and Dominy think the minister made the right decision. They calculated that Mr Pudey鈥檚 walk was 3.3 times more variable than typical walking.
Gait and Posture
