"Anne Elk's Theory on Brontosauruses" is a sketch from Episode 31 of ''

Monty Python's Flying Circus ''Monty Python's Flying Circus'' (also known as simply ''Monty Python'') is a British surreal sketch comedy series created by and starring Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam, who became known ...

'', " The All-England Summarize Proust Competition" (1972). The sketch features a television presenter (

Graham Chapman Graham Chapman (8 January 1941 – 4 October 1989) was a British actor, comedian and writer. He was one of the six members of the surreal comedy group Monty Python. He portrayed authority figures such as The Colonel and the lead role in two P ...

) interviewing

paleontologist Paleontology (), also spelled palaeontology or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). It includes the study of fossi ...

Anne Elk (

John Cleese John Marwood Cleese ( ; born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, and producer. Emerging from the Cambridge Footlights in the 1960s, he first achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and ...

in drag). The plot of the sketch is that Miss Elk (who is very concerned about being properly credited: "A. Elk,

brackets A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'r ...

, Miss, brackets") has severe difficulty presenting her new theory about

brontosaurus ''Brontosaurus'' (; meaning "thunder lizard" from Greek , "thunder" and , "lizard") is a genus of gigantic quadruped sauropod dinosaurs. Although the type species, ''B. excelsus'', had long been considered a species of the closely related ''A ...

es due to her bizarre mannerisms, which include

circumlocution Circumlocution (also called circumduction, circumvolution, periphrasis, kenning, or ambage) is the use of an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea. It is sometimes necessary in communication (for example, to work around lexical gap ...

, repetition, and obnoxious, noisy

throat-clear A throat-clear is a sound made at the back of the throat. The throat-clear is articulated as a single-syllable exclamation, written onomatopoeiacally as "hem"; or it may be articulated as a double-syllable sound, written as "ahem", which is expre ...

ing. When she is finally able to state her theory, it turns out to be a very trite observation that "All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end." In the original broadcast version, the sketch is taken over by other jokes from within the same episode, and spills over into the set of a previous sketch where Miss Elk concludes the episode with a second theory about

Marcel Proust Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (; ; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel ''In Search of Lost Time'' (''À la recherche du temps perdu''; with the previous Eng ...

. This sketch was also performed on the album ''

Monty Python's Previous Record ''Monty Python's Previous Record'' is the third album by Monty Python. Released in 1972, it marked the group's first collaborations with regular sound engineer Andre Jacquemin as well as musician Neil Innes, who had previously appeared with fut ...

'', under the title 'Miss Anne Elk'. In this version, before she begins her second theory, the interviewer shoots her. At Cleese's request, the sketch was performed as part of the team's 2014 live reunion show, ''

Monty Python Live (Mostly) ''Monty Python Live (Mostly)'' (also billed as ''Monty Python Live (Mostly): One Down, Five to Go'') was a variety show by the Monty Python comedy group at The O2 in London in July 2014. Planned as a single performance for 1 July, it was expanded ...

'', with

Eric Idle Eric Idle (born 29 March 1943) is an English actor, comedian, musician and writer. Idle was a member of the British surreal comedy group Monty Python and the parody rock band The Rutles, and is the writer of the music and lyrics for the Broadwa ...

playing the interviewer. This version concluded with an extended coughing fit, before linking to the "Dancing Teeth" animation. The sketch inspired the concept of "Elk theories" to describe scientific observations that are not theories but merely minimal accounts. The character A. Elk and her "Theory of Brontosauruses" is used in the American Psychological Association Style Guide to illustrate how to reference a periodical article in a learned journal.

References

{{Monty Python 1972 works 1972 in British television Monty Python sketches Apatosaurinae Television episodes about dinosaurs