How to Irritate People

How to Irritate People
DVD cover
Directed by	Ian Fordyce
Produced by	David Frost
Written by	Tim Brooke-Taylor Graham Chapman John Cleese Marty Feldman
Starring	John Cleese Tim Brooke-Taylor Graham Chapman Michael Palin Gillian Lind Connie Booth Dick Vosburgh
Release date	1968
Running time	68 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English

How to Irritate People is a 1968 television broadcast written by John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor. Cleese, Chapman, and Brooke-Taylor also feature in it, along with future Monty Python collaborators Michael Palin and Connie Booth.

In various sketches, Cleese demonstrates exactly what the title suggests—how to irritate people, although this is done in a much more conventional way than the absurdity of similar Monty Python sketches.

The "Job Interview" sketch, starring Cleese as the interviewer and Brooke-Taylor as the interviewee, was later performed, almost unchanged, in the first season of Monty Python's Flying Circus with Chapman as the interviewee. The "pepperpots" also recurred in many Monty Python sketches, and the "Freedom of Speech" segment was lifted from At Last the 1948 Show.

The "Egocentrism" sketch, starring Cleese as the host/interviewer and Chapman as interviewee Dr. Rhomboid Goatcabin, features a discussion about freedom of speech in Great Britain, in which Cleese's character repeatedly reformulates the subject's main question ("Do you believe there is freedom of speech in this country?") in so many ways as to start a monologue and not let Chapman's character speak. This increasingly annoys the interviewee to the point where he is forced to murder the host in order to express his opinion on the matter, only to be interrupted again by his spirit.

The "Car Salesman" sketch, in which Palin refuses to accept customer Chapman's claim that a car he sold is faulty, later inspired Python's Dead Parrot sketch in which the malfunctioning car is replaced by an expired parrot.

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