The Colonel

The Colonel is a recurring fictional character from the British television show Monty Python's Flying Circus, played by Graham Chapman. Character The Colonel acts as a "straight man" comic foil to the show's absurd characters and sketches. He maintains a rigidly mirthless personality and is always dressed in British Army No. 2 Dress uniform. He occasionally makes appearances in the show, usually breaking the fourth wall and disrupting sketches to pronounce them too silly for the public and, therefore, demanding that something else be shown. He often orders the show to proceed in a different direction (sometimes to the unshown director) and frequently makes offhanded insults to men with long hair. The Colonel's role in stopping or redirecting sketches has been discussed as an example of a character breaking the fourth wall of theatrical production, challenging the "fictional credibility" of the presentation, and has been compared to the work of Luigi Pirandello. Main appearances The Colonel appeared first in the pilot episode, "Whither Canada?" in a documentary-formatted sketch, to help describe the Allied Forces involvement in joke warfare during World War II.