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"Spam" is a Monty Python sketch, first televised in 1970. In the sketch, two customers are lowered into a greasy spoon café by wires and try to order a breakfast from a menu that includes Spam in almost every dish. The sketch was written by Terry Jones and Michael Palin.
Contents
It features Terry Jones as the Waitress, Eric Idle as Mr. Bun and Graham Chapman as Mrs. Bun. The televised sketch also featured John Cleese as The Hungarian and Michael Palin as a historian, but this part was left out of audio recordings of the sketch.
The term spam in the context of electronic communications is derived from this sketch.
Plot
The three and a half minute sketch is set in the fictional Green Midget Café in Bromley. An argument develops between the waitress, who recites a menu in which nearly every item contains Spam (among them, "Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce, garnished with truffle pâté, brandy and a fried egg on top and Spam"), and Mrs Bun, who does not like Spam. She asks for an item with the Spam removed, much to the amazement of her Spam-loving husband. The waitress responds to this request with disgust.
At several points, a group of Vikings in the restaurant interrupts conversation by loudly singing "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spammity Spam, Wonderful Spam." The irate waitress orders them to shut up, but they resume singing more loudly. A Hungarian tourist comes to the counter, trying to order by using a wholly inaccurate Hungarian/English phrasebook (a reference to a previous sketch). He is rapidly escorted away by a police constable.
The sketch abruptly cuts to a historian in a television studio talking about the Vikings. As he goes on, he inserts the word 'spam' into everything he says ("...and Spam selecting a Spam particular Spam item from the Spam menu, would Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam..."), and the backdrop is raised to reveal the restaurant set behind. The historian joins the Vikings, Mr. and Mrs. Bun are lifted by wires out of the scene, and the singing continues.
Menu
Impact
The phenomenon, some years later, of marketers drowning out discourse by flooding Usenet newsgroups and individuals' email with junk mail advertising messages was named spamming, due to some early internet users that flooded forums with the word spam recounting the repetitive and unwanted presence of spam in the sketch. This phenomenon has been reported in court decisions handed down in lawsuits against spammers – see, for example, CompuServe Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, Inc., 962 F.Supp. 1015, n. 1 (S.D.Ohio 1997). Furthermore, it has been referenced in an Electronic Frontier Foundation amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court of the United States in 2014. The term also is used to refer to mass marketing using junk phone calls or text messages, and has since entered video gaming lingo as a term to refer to producing a large quantity of something, such as rocket-spamming or grenade-spamming.
The Python programming language, named after Monty Python, prefers to use spam, ham, and eggs as metasyntactic variables, instead of the traditional foo, bar, and baz; the name "egg" is also used for an installation package format for Python libraries.
Hormel's response
Spam makers Hormel, while never happy with the use of the word spam for junk email, have been supportive of Monty Python and their sketch. Hormel issued a special tin of Spam for the Broadway premiere of Eric Idle's Spamalot, a musical based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
The sketch is part of the company's Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota, United States, and also mentioned in Spam's on-can advertisements for the product's 70th anniversary in 2007 - although the date of the Python sketch was incorrectly stated to be 1971 instead of 1970.
In 2007 the Hormel company decided that such publicity was part of their corporate image, possibly for the better, and sponsored a game where their product is strongly associated with Monty Python, even featuring a product with "Stinky French Garlic" as part of the promotion of Spamalot. For the company's 75th anniversary in 2012, they introduced Sir Can-A-Lot, a knight character, appearing on the product's packaging with the phrase "Glorious SPAM®!".