Daily Dialogue — July 14, 2018

Customer: Just short back and sides please.
Barber: How do you do that?
Customer: Well, it’s just… ordinary short back and sides…
Barber: It’s not a … razor cut? (suddenly) Razor, razor, cut, cut, blood, spurt, artery, murder… (controlling himself) Oh thank God, thank God. (sigh of relief) It’s just a scissors…
Customer: Yes…
Barber: You wouldn’t rather just have it combed, would you sir?
Customer: I beg your pardon?
Barber: You wouldn’t rather forget all about it? Customer: No, no, no, I want it cut. (At the word Cut barber winces.) Cut, cut, cut, blood, spurt, artery, murder, Hitchcock, Psycho… right sir … well … (swallows hard) I’ll just get everything ready.

— And Now for Something Completely Different (1971), screen foreplay & conception by Graham Chapman & John Cleese & Terry Gilliam & Eric Idle & Terry Jones & Michael Palin

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Hair.

Trivia: The movie was filmed between the first and second seasons of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969). It contains several sketches that had been written for the second season but not yet performed, including the “Hungarian Phrasebook” sketch.

Dialogue On Dialogue: It’s possible to reverse engineer the conception of this sketch by noting the aberrant behavior by the barber on key words such as “razor” and “cut”. What if a barber is a compulsive killer and we see him with a customer and certain words trigger his psychopathology.