Spam (Monty Python sketch)

"Spam Song"
Single by Monty Python
from the album Another Monty Python Record
B-side	"The Concert"
Released	8 September 1972
Genre	Comedy
Label	Charisma
Songwriter(s)	Michael Palin Terry Jones Fred Tomlinson
Producer(s)	Michael Palin Terry Jones
Monty Python singles chronology
"Spam Song" (1972) "Eric The Half A Bee" (1972)

"Spam" is a Monty Python sketch, first televised in 1970 (series 2, episode 12, "Spam") and written by Terry Jones and Michael Palin. In the sketch, two customers are lowered by wires into a greasy spoon café and try to order a breakfast from a menu that includes Spam in almost every dish, much to the consternation of one of the customers. As the waitress recites the Spam-filled menu, a group of Viking patrons drown out all conversations with a song, repeating "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam… Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!".^[1]

The excessive amount of Spam was probably a reference to the ubiquity of it and other imported canned meat products in the United Kingdom after World War II (a period of rationing in the UK) as the country struggled to rebuild its agricultural base. Thanks to its wartime ubiquity, the British public had grown tired of it.^[2]

The televised sketch and several subsequent performances feature Terry Jones as the waitress, Eric Idle as Mr. Bun and Graham Chapman as Mrs. Bun, who does not like Spam. The original sketch also featured John Cleese as The Hungarian and Palin as a historian, but this part was left out of the audio version of the sketch recorded for the team's second album Another Monty Python Record (1971). A year later this track was released as the Pythons' first 7" single.

The use of the term spam for unsolicited electronic communications is derived from this sketch.^[3]