The Crimson Permanent Assurance is a short film that appears before the 1983 Monty Python movie The Meaning of Life.

Originally conceived as an animated sequence in The Meaning of Life, Terry Gilliam convinced the rest of Monty Python to allow him to produce and direct it as a live-action piece. According to Gilliam, its rhythm, length, and style of cinematography made it a poor fit as a scene in The Meaning of Life, so it became "Our Short Feature Presentation" and preceded the film.

In the film, a group of elderly office clerks who work for the Permanent Assurance Company, a staid British accountancy firm which has been taken over by The Very Big Corporation of America. When one of them is sacked, the accountants rebel against their corporate masters, commandeer their building and turn it into a pirate ship, sailing within London's business district and attacking The Very Big Corporation of America's skyscraper using wooden file cabinets which had become magically transformed into carronades. With ropes, they then swing into a board room and engage their bosses in hand-to-hand combat, vanquishing them.

After their hard-earned victory, the clerks continue to "sail the wide accountancy" (as they sang in their heroic sea shanty), until unceremoniously meeting their (now-animated) end by falling off the edge of the world.

They do briefly appear within The Meaning of Life itself, where their raid is halted by another skyscraper "collapsing" onto the sailing Permanent Assurance Company building.