The Penis Song (Not the Noël Coward Song) by Monty Python (1983)

Eric Idle sits at a grand piano in a dinner jacket, in a scene from The Meaning of Life, and performs a jaunty music-hall number that lists synonyms. That is the entire premise. "Willy", "John Thomas" and a handful of others get their turn, and the song ends before it has had time to become anything other than a list. It is the shortest entry here and packs more distinct words for the organ into one minute than most songs manage in five, a vocabulary lesson no school would book.

The subtitle is the second joke. Noël Coward wrote sophisticated, sly, perfectly enunciated songs about love and society; Idle borrows the tuxedo, the piano and the diction and uses them to sing about a penis. The gap between the delivery and the content is where the comedy lives, and it is a very Python move: they did the same thing with philosophers and with lumberjacks.

Its afterlife is a jury. The Meaning of Life won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury at Cannes in 1983, which means one of the most serious film festivals in the world sat through this, in formal wear, and gave the film a prize. Nobody searches for it by its full title; people search for the Monty Python penis song, which is why a sixty-second film interlude outranks most singles on recognition.