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 Kurtzman's "Help!" magazine, one issue of which featured Cleese. Moving from the US to England, he animated features for "Do Not Adjust Your Set" and was then asked by its makers to join them on their next project: "Monty Python's Flying Circus". He co-directed "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and directed short segments of other Python films (for instance "The Crimson Permanent Assurance", the short film that appears before "The Meaning of Life"). When Monty Python was first formed, two writing partnerships were already in place: Cleese and Chapman, Jones and Palin. That left two in their own corners: