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This one time, at band camp ...
no, this really is a band camp story, and I did play the clarinet, but I didn't do that.
Every now and again the band director would put music on the stands to test people's ability to sight-read.
One day we came in to find a John Phillip Sousa march, called The Liberty Bell.
"Great," everyone grumbled. "Marching band stopped being about John Phillip Sousa years ago! This is LAME!!"
Then we started fumbling our way through.
After the first couple of notes, a good proportion of the band was playing with much more than the usual lack of confidence, and ended with a flourish, and a very loud fart sound from one of the trombonists.
The band director was perplexed.
He had no idea what he had done.
He had never seen Monty Python.
He was subsequently educated.
There was another incident involving an Honors Philosophy professor, who was equally innocent of Great British Comedy. The class walked across the Quad with him serenading him with the Bruces Philosophers' Song. He was quite horrified that anyone would make fun of something as important as philosophy.
I had the good fortune of catching the Pythons when they were first aired in the U.S. One of the regular networks, I think it was ABC ran a couple episodes in a late night time slot, sometime in the mid-70s. I regularly watched the PBS run, and have most of the albums on vinyl. The first one I got was an import ... Live at Drury Lane, which had all of the great bits ... Dead Parrot, Lumberjack Song, Argument Clinic. Ah, the joy of it all.
Scary to think of the shows as being 40 years old, though.
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