The Army Protection Racket is a sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus, episode 8 entitled "Full Frontal Nudity". It is set in the office of the very proper Colonel (played by Graham Chapman.

Plot summary

Private Watkins (Eric Idle) enters the office and makes a request to leave the army, since he only joined "...for the water-skiing and for the travel, sir..." and did not expect that there might be killing, war, tanks, guns, or anything of that sort.

After the Colonel gets annoyed with Watkins and tells him to sit in a corner, a pair of mafiosos named Luigi and Dino Vercotti (portrayed by Michael Palin and Terry Jones) enter and start making not-so-subtle threats, each more ridiculous than the last. These include:

The insinuation (punctuated by knocking small items off the mantelpiece and the Colonel's desk) that the base's 500 tanks may be in danger because "everything breaks, don't it Colonel";

Dino, saying about the two divisions of paratroops that it would "be a shame if someone was to set fire to them";

Luigi's question about what would happen if "some of your tanks was to get broken and troops started getting lost, er, fights started breaking out during general inspection, like."

After a little while, the brothers make demands for ridiculously small amounts of protection money. The Colonel refuses to even consider them, even when they are reduced even further, and soon brings the sketch to a halt with a stern declaration that "the whole premise is silly and it's very badly written. I'm the senior officer here and I haven't had a funny line yet. So I'm stopping it." He then takes over as director until the linking cartoon starts, ending the sketch by shouting "Shut up you eyeties!" at the Vercotti brothers, who are (perhaps with justification) accusing him of ending it solely because he couldn't think of a punchline.

External links

Sketch As featured in the Flying Circus TV Show - Episode 8 at Garrett Gilchrist's PythoNET