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Often cast as comical authority figures (most notably the Colonel)

His pipe

Walking onto the screen and talking directly to the audience to let them know that a sketch has gotten too absurd and will now end

Towering height

Playing the straight central character [King Arthur, Brian, Yellowbeard, etc.].

Died of cancer on 4th October 1989, just one day before the 20th anniversary of Monty Python. Terry Jones called it "The worst case of party-pooping I've ever seen.".

When he came out to his parents, his mother cried for a week. His father, however, was especially accepting, telling not to worry, and that "women don't understand this sort of thing".

Struggled with alcoholism, especially during the filming of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). According to Terry Gilliam, Chapman constantly forgot his lines and was so drunk during filming that he couldn't make it across the Bridge of Death, so the assistant cameraman had to double for him. Additionally, Chapman was genuinely struggling with the rock climbing scene because of his alcohol struggle, which surprised the other Pythons since they had known him to be an excellent climber and wondered if his suit was interfering with his climbing.

While filming Life of Brian (1979) in Tunisia, he put his medical knowledge to good use and opened a surgery for the cast and crew. He brought along and dispensed much-needed medication for things like dehydration, food poisoning and other Tunisian complaints.

Is the only member of Monty Python's Flying Circus who never worked in one of Terry Gilliam's non-Python projects.

We don't deliberately set out to offend. Unless we feel it's justified. And in the case of certain well-known religions, it was justified.

I hope I will have achieved something lasting.

John Howard Davies was not a very human person ... if you made a mistake of any kind, any sort of pause in speech, he would treat you rather as if he was a schoolmaster.

[Chapman and the other members of the Monty Python group traveled to visit the site of Dachau concentration camp in Germany, but were told by staff that they were too late and the museum was about to close] Tell them we're Jewish.

[1974; on whether his Monty Python work serves to get something out of his system that needs to be gotten out] Certainly in terms of writing. You get the argument from a lot of people that you're supposed to write to make people laugh. That's true. But also everything you do is written from something in your own experience. Nothing is written from outside the universe. You can't do a good situation comedy about stones. It's got to be animate. It has to be about human beings. Writing is therapeutic for me because - as you say - it gets something out of my system, some frustration, some anger. You almost have to be angry to write, I think. If you're angry about something, then you can always put something down on paper. If you're not, if you're just totally happy - and I don't actually know anyone in the whole bleeding world that is - you wouldn't be able to write a single thing. But if you're angry about something, it's possible to be witty, possible to be interesting, possible to write.