Monty Python’s In-Studio Sketches Sometimes Played to Complete Silence

A running gag in Monty Python’s Flying Circus found the show occasionally cutting away to old stock footage of an audience of elderly women tepidly applauding.

Well, it turns out that this joke may have been closer to the truth than we thought.

According to The First 28 Years of Monty Python by Kim “Howard” Johnson, the clip was really “stock footage of a Women’s Institute meeting.” Michael Palin noted that it was likely pulled from the BBC’s vast library of footage by their researcher, but confessed that “it was rather like our own audiences (at the start).”

Much of Monty Python’s Flying Circus was filmed in front of a live audience, but this wasn’t their choice. According to producer and director Ian MacNaughton “that was BBC policy, to have a studio audience.” And that policy didn’t always work out for the Pythons. As they were preparing to shoot the very first episode of the show back in 1969, the incoming crowd weighed on the minds of the group, especially John Cleese. “Do you realize, Michael, we may be about to be the first people in history to record a half-hour comedy show to complete silence?’” Cleese said to Palin. 

He had good reason to be concerned. According to Eric Idle, their first in-studio crowd was both elderly and confused. “The original audience consisted largely of little old ladies who had been bused in to the BBC Television Centre thinking they were going to see some kind of a circus,” Idle wrote in his memoir Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.

Per Cleese Encounters by Jonathan Margolis, the BBC gave out tickets to Monty Python’s Flying Circus to people who had free time and were interested in attending a taping of any television show. As a result, audiences were usually older women visiting from out of town, and “audience reaction could be pretty muted.” In some sketches, the audience was reportedly silent, with the only laughter coming from Cleese’s then-wife Connie Booth, and Terry Jones’ brother who were “loyally rolling in the aisles.”

Cleese later claimed that they were “polite” to the studio audience, but their reaction was something that the Pythons ultimately “ignored.” 

While some jokes clearly didn’t land in person, MacNaughton claimed that the Pythons made it a policy to never sweeten episodes with canned laughter. “We thought, if the audience don’t really like it, (viewers) won’t laugh anyway,” the producer revealed, “and there’s nothing worse than listening to shows that have laugh tracks on and the audience is roaring with laughter at something you found totally unfunny yourself.”

Of course, the show eventually became more established, and seemingly drew a studio audience of folks who knew what they were getting into. Jones once said that, as the series became more popular, the far bigger problem was “having to take laughs out because it was holding up the shows.”

While the show didn’t add in any laughter, they were once forced to dub in the sounds of audience boos.