The ‘Terrible’ Final Sketch Starring Every Member of Monty Python Was Never Released

Monty Python famously reunited in 2014 for a series of concerts at London’s O2 Arena, thrilling fans and, more to the point, allowing them to pay off their staggering legal debts.

Apart from archival footage, the reunion obviously didn’t feature the late Graham Chapman. It also didn’t contain any new material, merely familiar songs and sketches from pre-existing Python projects. Which does beg the question: What exactly was the final Monty Python sketch?

While the last significant Python project was 1983’s Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, all six original members did get together one last time to celebrate the troupe’s 20th anniversary. And they did end up filming a new sketch. Unfortunately, it never ended up seeing the light of day, apparently, because it sucked so hard.

1989’s Parrot Sketch Not Included – 20 Years of Monty Python was a TV special, hosted by Steve Martin, which highlighted some of the best Python routines. It was mostly just old clips, but the six Pythons did briefly appear in the special, for the last time, as the wordless punchline to a brief joke about how they’re living in Martin’s cupboard.

But originally, the plan was to include a whole new Monty Python sketch, in which the Pythons played schoolboys opposite Martin. Unfortunately, the sketch wasn’t actually written by Monty Python. “Somebody had cobbled this thing together and was passing it off, saying it was written by John or whatever,” Terry Jones revealed in The Pythons Autobiography by The Pythons. “When | read it I thought, ‘This is just terrible, we can’t do this.’ So we arrived and Steve Martin was there at the film studios. We had to turn up to do it and I’m very glad that they cut it.”

Michael Palin believed that attempting to shoehorn the group into a pre-existing sketch with another comedian was antithetical to what made the Pythons so great in the first place. “This legendary group had got together with this legendary American comedian to produce a legendary moment and that, for me, is not the way humor works,” Palin argued. “It didn’t really feel as though it was working at the time.”

Palin went on to admit that “the idea of getting Steve Martin and the Pythons together was a nice one in the sense that we respected each other,” but he stressed that “Python was at its best when it just was the group of us. It was quite a self-contained momentum. It couldn’t be exported, it couldn’t be grafted onto anyone else nor could anyone else be grafted onto Python.”

While Eric Idle found the reunion to be pleasant and “nostalgic,” he, similarly, didn’t believe that the sketch was up to the group’s standards. “We weren’t very good. We weren’t very funny,” he confessed.

The sketch itself was never released, but some behind-the-scenes footage of the Pythons in their schoolboy costumes was included in the documentary Life of Python.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Cleese had a difference of opinion on the matter. He claimed that he was “embarrassed” when the sketch was cut out of the special. “I don’t think I was very involved in that decision because I think I would have rather resisted cutting it,” Cleese stated. “That’s the last time Graham performed.”

Chapman passed away just one month after the shoot. When he showed up to the set in a wheelchair, the rest of the Pythons were shocked by his “frail” appearance. But he still managed to appear in the sketch. In his diary from the time, Palin called Chapman’s participation “inspiring,” but noted that “the sight of him in a blond wig and schoolboy cap sums up the whole misbegotten day.”

Hey, at least they didn’t have to perform it in front of an audience of checked-out senior citizens.