323: Monty Python - Carl French

The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail
1975
Michael Palin as Interviewer
Graham Chapman as Carl French


0.00 – 2.41

Interviewer: Mr. French, you're one of the film world's most arrogant queens. I mean not just homosexual or Gay or anything, I mean you are a raving queen.
Carl French: Well, yes.
Interviewer: I mean, a real screamer, a real "Whoops! Get her! Don't mind me dear!" limp-wristed caricature.
Carl French: Is that not in order?
Interviewer: No, no, that's fine. And I understand that you married the beautiful black heiress Hueyna Tanoy partly for the publicity but mostly to cover up the fact that you prefer going out with Little Boys.
Carl French: Look, really!
Interviewer: Carl, you're an offending little poof, a mincing gay-bar loiterer, a winnet-covered walking perfume shop and an evil perverter of innocent little boys!
Carl French: What!? Really! Is this part of the interview?
Interviewer: No, no, I just wanted a few contacts.
Carl French: Well, shouldn't we be talking about the film?
Interviewer: We’ve been off the air for ages. Now, where'd you find them?
Carl French: Look, I think we are still on the air.
Interviewer: Oh, sod the fucking air! Can’t you still get locked up for that sort of thing.
Carl French: What about the film?
Interviewer: Just a few addresses, please...
Carl French: Look, we’ve got James Dean in it, in a box!
Interviewer: I-I can turn the microphone off if you...
Carl French: And bits of Jayne Mansfield...

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Apparently the first half, the stuff about keeping a dead Marilyn Monroe in a box, originated in a sketch by Douglas Adams.
As per Monty Python, one bizarre concept leaps into another, switching from the weird film into the strange abuse. And abuse it intentionally is, not what one usually expects in the course of some film PR. Chapman’s performanceplays it as un-gay as possible, a perfectly stolid character, even as the interviewer moves beyond abuse, into baroque invective, and then realms of scandalous sexual criminality. Yet there’s also a freedom, since this sketch would probably not have passed on television or on cinema. As a LP sketch it can ascend to new heights of bad taste, and just let the abuse flow, matched by Palin’s escalating shrieking hysteria, as he skips in and out of mocking faggy voices. And then the final twist, which isn’t a million miles away from “Nudge Nudge”’s “What’s it like?”

If you were wondering, a “winnet” is the ball of unremoved specks of shit that dry onto the hairs around your sphincter. Share this information with your colleagues at work.