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Professor Dominy's study of Monty Python's sketch, "The Ministry of Silly Walks" is profiled in the news

Posted on April 10, 2020 by Julie Gilman

Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks sketch has been making audiences laugh for 50 years, and now we have a sense of just how silly its star's walking style is. An analysis shows that John Cleese's comedic gait is about 6.7 times more variable – or sillier – than standard human walking. Read more here...

  • Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks

The paper is titled, "Peer review at the Ministry of Silly Walks" and it is published in the journal Gait & Posture (available here). Abstract: Fifty years ago, the groundbreaking British sketch series Monty Python's Flying Circus premiered on BBC One and forever changed the world of comedy. The humour transcended mere absurdity by poking a subversive finger in the eye of buttoned-up British society. Here, we commemorate this cultural milestone and simultaneously call attention to an emerging concept in the health sciences, termed simplified peer review. The union of these disparate subjects motivates a formal gait analysis based on one of the troupe's most iconic sketches, "The Ministry of Silly Walks", a satire of bureaucratic inefficiency.