Yeah.. It also used to work with def, but it was removed in python3. You can do this in 2.7:

  def func((a,b)):
      return b

  mytuple = 1,2
  print func(mytuple)

in py3 you need

  def func(t):
      a,b = t
      return b

Not sure if

This is probably the cleaner way to write that:

  key=operator.itemgetter(1)