One of my favorite Monty Python sketches – a “deep track,” if you will – is one where the whole crew (even Neil Innes) engage in suitably breathless election result reporting. Along the way we learn the fates of the Sensible party, the Silly party, and, eventually, the Very Silly party:

I’ve always assumed that was just satire about the pointlessness of politics. Little did I know that this was closer to a situation of art imitating life than I could imagine.

In the wake of the recent British elections, Christa over at Lawyers, Guns & Money tells us the tale of Lord Buckethead, occasional candidate for parliament. Lord Buckethead comes from a low-rent rip off of Star Wars and looks about like you’d expect a generic Darth Vader with a bucket on his head to look like. Freed from the service of that second-rate narrative, Lord Buckethead has run for Parliament three times since 1987 – all against Tory Prime Ministers.

Now, you might be thinking that even in the United States we have our share of nutty candidates who file papers. What’s different is that in this country we make sure nobody actually sees them during the process. By contrast, in the UK, Lord Buckethead (and whoever the Very Silly party is running) get to be on stage with the “real” candidates when the results are announced. As a result, things like this happen:

How would Lord Buckethead fare in American politics? Hard to say, but he’d at least have to find a different name. We’ve already got a strange guy with a bucket on his head – and he’ll shred all over that stove-pipe motherfucker’s ass: