The Visual Rhetoric of Monty Python’s Flying Circus: Fulfilling Noël Carroll’s Hopes for a Classification of Sight Gags

Abstract

Abstract In his 1990s studies of visual humor, Noël Carroll left to “future researchers” the laborious task of developing a “comprehensive and rigorous classification of the phenomena” pertaining to “the sight gag.” Carroll contributed five possible items belonging to such a taxonomy, i. e., “the mutual interference gag” (e. g., a character’s perspective vs the viewer’s one), “mimed metaphors” (e. g., Chaplin’s bread rolls as dancing feet), “the object analog” (e. g., a tuba used as an umbrella), “the switch image” (i. e., reinterpretations forced by montage) and “the solution gag” (e. g., the character’s inventiveness surprises the viewer). Following the implicit reference to rhetoric built in the very names of some of these items, this article shows how the well-established tropes of classical rhetoric, indeed three hundred of them, can be employed, with a modicum of analogical creativity, in order to address the visual component of comedic sketches, as exemplified by Monty Python’s famous Flying Circus.