The Lumberjack Song
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Template:Cleanup-date Image:Lumberjack Song.png The Lumberjack Song is one of the best-known and most popular sketches by the Monty Python's Flying Circus comedy troupe. The song was written by Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Fred Tomlinson.
The sketch appeared in several forms (on the original television series, film, stage, and LP). Each time the sketch started differently.
The common theme was of a man (originally Michael Palin, in later live versions Eric Idle) who expresses dissatisfaction with his current job, and then announces, "I didn't want to do this job. I wanted to be... a lumberjack!" He proceeds to wax rhapsodic about the life of a lumberjack ("Leaping from tree to tree," etc.), and lists various trees by their scientific names. He then rips off his overshirt to reveal a red flannel shirt, walks over to a stage backed with a coniferous forest, and begins to sing about the wonders of being a lumberjack. He is unexpectedly backed up by a large set of male singers, all dressed as Canadian Mounties (several were regular Monty Python performers, while the rest were members of an actual singing troupe, the Fred Tomlinson Singers). Carol Cleveland, or in the film John Cleese's wife Connie Booth, plays his girl.
As the song continues, the excited lumberjack increasingly reveals cross-dressing tendencies, which both causes the girl visible distress and confuses the Mounties who continue to repeat and chorus his lines until they walk off in disgust. In the video/dvd version of And now for something completely different, at the end of the song the lumberjack is pelted with rotten fruit and eggs by the mounties, who can also be heard shouting various insults.
The sketch took its inspiration from a discussion Palin had with an assistant cameraman, in which the subject was the cameraman's former jobs. One of the jobs was revealed to be that of a lumberjack.
Trivia
- In the original TV sketch, the song ends with "my dear Mama", but in all subsequent performances, including the film, it is "my dear Papa".
- In 2003, a version of the song was performed at the Concert For George as a tribute to George Harrison, with Palin and Cleveland in their respective roles and Tom Hanks as one of the Mounties.
- In a stage version of Monty Python's Flying Circus, where the show is performed in French, the song is entitled Le Bûcheron (chanson).
- The song was translated into German for Monty Pythons Fliegender Zirkus, a special made for German and Austrian television. One significant change is that the phrase "Just like my dear Papa" has been changed to "So, wie mein Onkel Walter" ("Just like my Uncle Walter"), to rhyme with "Büstenhalter", German for "bra".
- A line from this song is sung in the musical Spamalot.
- Surprisingly, a reference to this sketch has been featured in the Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi anime series, during the "movie world" episode. In it, one of the characters complains about his job and quotes the opening lines of the sketch (in Japanese) but is left behind by the main characters before the actual Lumberjack Song begins.
External links
de:Holzfäller-Lied es:La Canción del Leñador ja:木こりの歌 pl:Piosenka drwala