The Marriage Guidance Counsellor sketch is from the second Monty Python's Flying Circus episode, "Sex and Violence", first broadcast late on Sunday, 12 October 1969. It was also featured in the 1971 spinoff film And Now for Something Completely Different.
The sketch features Michael Palin and Carol Cleveland as a married couple (Arthur and Deirdre Pewtey) and Eric Idle as their marriage counsellor. The marriage guidance counsellor flirts with a receptive Mrs Pewtey rather than giving the couple advice, and Mr Pewtey fails to react to this behaviour and stand up for himself, even to the point where he meekly leaves the room when asked by the counsellor, who is clearly about to make love to Mrs Pewtey. In the television version, an American cowboy (John Cleese) convinces him he must "be a man" while in the film version, the voice of God convinces him.
The television version of the sketch ends with Mr Pewtey getting hit in the head with a chicken by a knight in a suit of armour (Terry Gilliam). In And Now for Something Completely Different, it ends with a 16-ton weight being dropped onto Pewtey's head. The words "So much for Pathos!" pops up after the weight lands on him.
Famous quotes containing the words marriage and/or guidance:
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
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“If Los Angeles has been called “the capital of crackpots” and “the metropolis of isms,” the native Angeleno can not fairly attribute all of the city’s idiosyncrasies to the newcomer—at least not so long as he consults the crystal ball for guidance in his business dealings and his wife goes shopping downtown in beach pajamas.”
—For the State of California, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)