The Colonel (Monty Python) The Colonel (Monty Python) The Colonel is a recurring fictional character from the British television show "Monty Python's Flying Circus", played by Graham Chapman. The Colonel acts as a "straight man" comic foil to the show's absurd characters and sketches. He maintains a rigidly mirthless personality and is always dressed in khaki British Army uniform. He occasionally makes appearances in the show, usually breaking the fourth wall and disrupting sketches to pronounce them too silly for the public and, therefore, demanding that something else be shown. He often orders the show to proceed in a different direction (sometimes to the
Monty Python each, in part to make time for commercials, and in part to avoid upsetting their audience. As the judge observed in "Gilliam v. American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.", where Monty Python sued for damages caused by broadcast of the mutilated version, "According to the network, appellants should have anticipated that most of the excised material contained scatological references inappropriate for American television and that these scenes would be replaced with commercials, which presumably are more palatable to the American public." Monty Python won the case. With the popularity of Python throughout the rest of the 1970s and through most of the