Summarize Proust Competition

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Summarize Proust Competition is a sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus. It appeared in the show's 31st episode.

The ostensible point of the competition is, as the title implies, to summarize Marcel Proust's leviathan novel À la recherche du temps perdu (which, at over 4000 pages, is considered the longest Western novel ever published). Contestants are given fifteen seconds to try to summarize as much of the work as possible; a meter that lists the book's seven volumes shows the contestant's progress. The first contestant barely gets past page one. After all of the entrants fail, the judge gives the award to "the girl with the biggest tits."

It was considered controversial as contestant Graham Chapman lists his hobbies as "strangling animals, golf, and masturbation". The BBC weren't keen on the word 'masturbation' being used in a comedy show (in 1972) and decided to remove the offending word from the show's soundtrack, so that only lip-readers could get the joke. The word appears censored on the recent DVD release of Flying Circus, but some earlier versions still contain an edited version in that the the word order is altered so that he says "golf" first and "strangling animals" second, making it seem as though strangling animals is the main joke, however the obvious editing is not entirely convincing.