Most Loved Comedy Sketches Trivia Quiz

Answer: Monty Python's Flying Circus

This is a sketched performed by John Cleese and Michael Palin where a customer returns a parrot to the pet shop because it is dead. The shopkeeper {Michael} says that it is only sleeping, and the customer gets into the kind of rage that only John Cleese can trying to prove that the parrot is dead. It was written by John Cleese and Graham Chapman as a skit on bad customer service.

Answer: Goodness Gracious Me

This was a ground breaking sketch in which the four Asian participants in the show parodied the crass things that British people say and do in Indian restaurants. When Kulvinder Ghir asked 'What is the blandest thing on the menu?' it was a big show of machismo.

The two women played by Meera Syal and Nina Wadia made personal remarks about the waiter's appearance. The fourth member Sanjeev Baskar is known for his work acting and writing on Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No. 42 and has also fronted a travel show about India.

Answer: The Two Ronnies

This sketch written by Ronnie Barker under his penname of Gerald Wiley is set in a hardware shop. The shop keeper played by Ronnie Corbett has difficulty in understanding what the customer, Ronnie Barker, is asking for e.g. four candles/fork handles. The humour is based on word play and homophones, and made more funny by the increasing frustration of both parties.

Answer: Victoria Wood as seen on TV

This is a sketch written by the late great Victoria Wood, in which Julie Waters plays an aged waitress who takes for ever to fetch two soups, forgetting the order, spilling them on the way etc. Celia Imrie and Duncan Preston play the anxious diners who have an appointment for after dinner.

Answer: Blackadder Goes Forth

This is from the wonderful Blackadder series written by Rowan Atkinson, Ben Elton and Richard Curtis. It depicts a smiling group of soldiers visiting Blackadder in his cell. They are his firing squad and have come to say hello and have a bit of banter with him before the fateful day. It is macabre but very funny.

Answer: The Morecombe and Wise Show

Eric Bartholomew and Ernest Wiseman began their double act in the days of vaudeville theatre, and became known as Morecombe (after the town where Eric was born) and Wise. Their Christmas television shows were legendary and virtually every British household tuned in to watch them.

Many big stars such as Andre Previn, Glenda Jackson, Penelope Keith and Angela Rippon appeared and allowed themselves to be the butt of the team's jokes. This particular sketch is a classic, where Eric and Ernie do all the usual tasks of making breakfast to the music of the strippers theme. Grapefruits are chopped in half to the four strong beats, and strings of sausages become boas.

Answer: The Frost Report

This wonderful sketch takes advantage of the different heights of John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett. John Cleese the tallest looks down on the other two because he is upper class. Ronnie Barker as the middle class one looks up to
Cleese but down on Corbett and little Ronnie Corbett 'knows his place' and looks up to everyone. It is a brilliant satire of the British class system, and was written by Marty Feldman and John Law.

Answer: Abbott and Costello

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were an American comedy duo who were very popular in the 1940s and early 50s. The joke is a play on words because one of the baseball players is called 'Who', and this leads to much misunderstanding and very clever patter. It is one of the best known sketches of all time. They recorded it three times twice in movies and once for their television show.

Answer: The Goodies

The Goodies were a trio of British comedians including Tim Brooke Taylor, Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden who were popular during the 1970s and 1980s. They went about on a bicycle made for three, and the basis of their show was that they were running an agency which would do anything at anytime.

This gave them plenty of opportunities to invent comic situations. Kitten Kong featured an enormous and very cute kitten who had terrorised New York and had climbed the empire state building in a skit on the gorilla in the famous movie King Kong.

Answer: Not the Nine O'clock News

In this sketch performed by Mel Smith and Rowan Atkinson Mel introduces Rowan, who is wearing a gorilla suit, and explains that the gorilla was quite wild when he started work with him. When the gorilla begins to speak he has a very cultured and sophisticated voice, and declares that 'of course he was wild, he was absolutely livid to be plucked from his native forest where he was quite happy'.