Sixteen Ton Weight
This sketch was the first appearance of Monty Python's 16-ton weight. In the typical style of a comedy or cartoon weight, it was coloured black, in shape of a right square frustum, and had its mass "16 TONS" painted on the side in large white letters. Monty Python's sixteen ton weight was hollow lightweight board and approximately 1.5m high, allowing it to readily conceal the character upon whom it was dropped. The sixteen ton weight was used periodically thereafter to bring an abrupt ending to sketches (in much the same way as the knight with a rubber chicken would do during the first series). A later episode would end with the weight being dropped on a TV announcer (played by Palin) and in the instant before cutting to a black screen, the viewer can see the top of the prop being broken due to Palin not ducking down fast enough.
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Famous quotes containing the words sixteen, ton and/or weight:
“Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It’s a palliative. The remedy is death.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“A ton of reading does not equal one good teacher.”
—Chinese proverb.
“In a town-meeting, the great secret of political science was uncovered, and the problem solved, how to give every individual his fair weight in the government, without any disorder from numbers. In a town-meeting, the roots of society were reached. Here the rich gave counsel, but the poor also; and moreover, the just and the unjust.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)