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| - It first appeared on the ninth episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, "The Ant: An Introduction" on BBC1 on December 14, 1969. The sketch has since been performed in several forms, including film, stage, and LP, each time started from a different skit. 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.
- The sketch appeared in several forms (on the original television series, film, stage, and LP). It first appeared on the ninth episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. The common theme is of a man (originally Michael Palin, in later live versions Eric Idle) who expresses dissatisfaction with his current job (as a barber, weather reporter, pet shop owner, etc.) and then announces, "I didn't want to do this job. I wanted to be... a lumberjack!" He proceeds to sing about the life of a lumberjack ("Leaping from tree to tree,"), and lists various trees by their scientific names. He then rips off his coat 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 m
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| abstract
| - The sketch appeared in several forms (on the original television series, film, stage, and LP). It first appeared on the ninth episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. The common theme is of a man (originally Michael Palin, in later live versions Eric Idle) who expresses dissatisfaction with his current job (as a barber, weather reporter, pet shop owner, etc.) and then announces, "I didn't want to do this job. I wanted to be... a lumberjack!" He proceeds to sing about the life of a lumberjack ("Leaping from tree to tree,"), and lists various trees by their scientific names. He then rips off his coat 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 Python performers, while the rest were members of an actual singing troupe, the Fred Tomlinson Singers). In the original sketch from the program and in the film version, the girl is played by Connie Booth, John Cleese's then-wife; in the Live version, the girl is played by Carol Cleveland. In the video/DVD version of And Now For Something Completely Different, it follows on from the infamous Dead Parrot sketch. As the song continues, the lumberjack increasingly reveals cross-dressing tendencies ("I cut down trees, I skip and jump, I like to press wildflowers, I put on women's clothing, and hang around in bars"), which both distresses the girl and confuses the Mounties who continue to repeat and chorus his lines until they walk off in disgust. The girl cries out "And I thought you were so rugged!" (That was in the original TV sketch; in other versions, she says, "I thought you were so butch!") before running off. 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 insults. Another notable difference is that in the original version the lumberjack wishes he was a girlie "just like my dear mama," whereas the And Now For Something Completely Different version substitutes "mama" with "papa," implying that the lumberjack inherited his tendency for transvestism from his father. The music is similar to Là ci darem la mano, Don Giovanni and Zerlina's duet in Act 1, Scene 2, of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. 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. There also exists a German version of The Lumberjack Song for which Palin learned the German text phonetically and the group of Mounties was replaced by a group of Austrian border guards. Instead of one of his parents, the German version credits the lumberjack's "Uncle Walter" as inspiring his passion for cross-dressing; this change was likely done simply for a rhyme with "Büstenhalter", the German translation for "bra", which caps the phrase preceding the "I wish I'd been a girlie..." line. In The Concert for George (a memorial concert put on one year to the day after George Harrison's death), they performed the Lumberjack Song with Tom Hanks as one of the chorus of lumberjacks.
- It first appeared on the ninth episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, "The Ant: An Introduction" on BBC1 on December 14, 1969. The sketch has since been performed in several forms, including film, stage, and LP, each time started from a different skit. 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.
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