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:
“We hope the day will soon come when every girl will be a member of a great Union of Unmarried Women, pledged to refuse an offer of marriage from any man who is not an advocate of their emancipation.”
—Tennessee Claflin (1846–1923)
“Now narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyrannizing cruelly or beneficently over others; they go the way their nature guides them. Add to this the guidance of interest, and you will have the key to most social riddles.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)