Monty Python - Biography
BY Tony Goldmark
When Monty Python’s Flying Circus premiered on BBC1 on October 5th, 1969, it was the end product of five British writer/performers – Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin – who had spent most of the sixties living in London, writing funny yet formulaic sketches for BBC personalities like David Frost and Marty Feldman, and for the children’s show Do Not Adjust Your Set (where they discovered the sixth Python, gonzo American animator Terry Gilliam). They were all tremendous fans of the landmark 1950s comedy series The Goon Show and yearned to do a similar sort of program, one where they could have creative autonomy, where no one could tell them not to be silly, and where the intellectual and the visceral could combine like never before. From their first episode of Flying Circus to their swan song feature film Meaning Of Life, the Monty Python troupe did for comedy what The Beatles did for rock & roll: they took the conventions, disassembled them, and reassembled them back together using a combination of ridiculous irreverence, post-modern audacity and brilliance in the field. In doing so, they didn’t just make people love comedy – they made people proud to love comedy.
That first season was like nothing anyone had ever seen, and nobody quite knew how to react to it. Each episode began with an old man on the precipice of death (Palin) running for at least a minute through harsh terrain, only to finally make it to the camera and say in his dying breath, “It’s…” Cut to some animation with flowers and a calm upper-class voice (Cleese) saying, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” This sort of introduction was as practical as it was funny – even when their show was in the throes of production, they couldn’t think of a proper title. After considering The Toad Elevating Moment, Owl-Stretching Time and Bun, Whackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot they finally settled on Monty Python’s Flying Circus after a late-night brainstorming session, not because the name made any sense at all (it didn’t) but because they all liked how it sounded – an ethos that continued as long as they wrote together.
Ever the angry young men, the Pythons mocked the status quo at every turn – in one episode, a stuffy British colonel appeared throughout to stop sketches whenever he thought they were getting too silly. In another, a gaggle of insufferable bluebloods competed in “The Upper-Class Twit of the Year” competition. Even the format of their sketches was worthy of mockery – the team had the luxury of replacing the dreaded punchline (which was rarely the funniest line of the sketch, and frequently killed it) with a Gilliam-produced piece of “linking” animation, which would lead the audience to the first image of the next sketch in a surreal fever dream of paper cut-out graphics.
The season aired erratically (usually late on Sunday nights, replacing a low-rated religious show), and didn’t become an enormous hit with viewers initially. But by the end of the first run, enough of a cult audience had warmed up to it for the BBC to commission a second in 1970. That same year, BBC Records released the first Monty Python LP, also titled Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to capitalize on the show (par for the course at BBC in the age before home video). It was essentially a hastily thrown-together “Best of Season One” audio retrospective, including “The Cinema” (better known as the Albatross sketch), “Trade Description Act” (better known as the Crunchy Frog sketch) and “Flying Sheep” (the latter half of which is incomprehensible without the visual). Palin and Jones saw the potential of expanding the Python muse to vinyl, and the following year they signed a deal to continue releasing albums on the independent Charisma Records. Rather than just another collection of recycled bits from the show, 1971’s Another Monty Python Record felt more like the show, with links between tracks, strange characters and elements that recurred at inappropriate moments, and specific rewrites of the material for the new format (for instance, at the end of a news report about notorious gangsters, one of the gangsters shows up and commits violence to the record by scratching it). They followed this up with 1972’s Monty Python’s Previous Record, which was almost half new material. Because these albums were so innovative, and because they were imported to the U.S. before the show was, Monty Python developed a reputation as a record act first and a show second, in the states at least. Incidentally, though the BBC release was the first Python LP (and the first one reissued on CD), it’s the only out-of-print Python CD, and remains a holy grail (no pun intended) for collectors. Another Monty Python Record was the first Monty Python record in the U.S., which for Python standards was almost too perfect.
Some of the best-known classic Python sketches appeared on both the show and these albums. In “Pet Shop” a frustrated customer (Cleese) attempts to return a dead parrot, and gets thwarted at every logical turn. In “The Lumberjack Song” a dream to ruggedly cut down trees slowly turns into a dream to have been born female (“just like my dear papa”). In “Argument Clinic” a supposed professional argues whether “yes it is/no it isn’t” is an argument at all. And perhaps most sublimely, in “Spam” a diner only serves dishes with Spam in them, and at various points the Vikings who inhabit the eatery launch into a rousing Viking chorus of “Spam Spam Spam Spam, Spam Spam Spam Spam, Wonderful Spam, Wonderful Spam.” (Decades later, when the inventors of the internet needed a term for the deluge of unwanted marketing emails, they looked to Python). Monty Python didn’t realize how massive their success was until they toured Europe and North America, and saw the crowds cheer them on like rock stars.
On a 1998 HBO reunion special, Jones admitted that though they wanted to keep the show unpredictable, the fact that “Pythonesque” is in the Oxford dictionary shows the extent to which they failed. By season three the “format” (or lack thereof) was starting to show its age, and the troupe tried anything they could to keep the audience guessing. In the first episode of season three, they cut to a man in the middle of the desert saying “Lemon curry?” three or four times in the middle of sketches. In another episode, they ended with two minutes of ocean waves, with Cleese telling the audience “There aren’t any more jokes” and being correct. In another, their cold open was longer than the rest of the show. In still another, they ended with an announcer saying, “And now, ten more minutes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus” – the audience, who had been told the same thing ten minutes ago, kept watching whatever the next program was, thinking it was more Python (they imitated the rest of BBC’s programming so perfectly that there was no way to tell one from the other sometimes). This experimentation continued into the fourth season, but BBC policy had started to tighten their straightjacket restraints – Gilliam had the idea, for instance, to do an episode where the sound level gets progressively lower for about ten minutes, until the viewer has to turn the knob all the way up to get anything, then BANG! THE LOUDEST SOUND POSSIBLE, blowing out every TV in Europe. The BBC said no. It was their fourth album, 1973’s Matching Tie And Handkerchief, that had their most effective experiment: two different side 2s! Depending on what specific groove you set the needle on, side 2 would play one of two entirely different fifteen-minute blocks of material (to further stupefy listeners, no track listing was given on the jacket, and both sides of the actual record were labeled “Side 2.”) Perhaps because of this gimmick, Handkerchief became their most successful record, peaking at #48 on the American Billboard album charts.
After three seasons on BBC1, they decided the next logical step was a feature film, the historical comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail. An irreverent take on the Arthurian legends, with Chapman in the role of King Arthur, Holy Grail included such infinitely quotable scenes as “The Knights Who Say NI!,” the Black Knight who loses his limbs and won’t give up fighting, and the guards who can’t quite grasp the concept of “Don’t let him leave the room until I come and get him.” It was filmed in five weeks, on the shoestring budget of £150,000, which itself was raised through the investments of rock groups like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd because no studio was interested in such a silly film. Tensions ran high on set – Jones and Gilliam co-directed and neither had much directing experience, the alcoholic Chapman couldn’t remember lines, and egos flared every day – but when they finally finished it, the film became a huge success in Britain and an even huger success in America, where cult audiences and comedy fans have spent over thirty years re-discovering it.
After they finished shooting Holy Grail, the BBC offered them a fourth season, and every member agreed except Cleese. Cleese had worked in TV sketch comedy for longer than any of them, didn’t feel Python was going anywhere it hadn’t gone before, and was quite anxious to move on to greener pastures (he created the sitcom Fawlty Towers, still hailed by critics as the gold standard of sitcoms). Undaunted, the rest of the team did the fourth season without Cleese, but it proved harder than they thought to maintain the same comic exuberance with one peg missing from their table. Season four lasted six episodes instead of the usual thirteen.
In 1979, all six Pythons reformed for their second feature film, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a biblical epic that radically usurped The Bible’s infallibility by pleading for skepticism. It depicted a typical guy named Brian (Chapman), who lived a life parallel to Jesus Christ and was frequently confused for the Messiah. When Brian tells an enormous crowd, “You don’t have to listen to me! You are all individuals!” the crowd responds “YES! WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS!” in unison. At the film’s climax, the entire cast gets crucified to the strains of Idle’s optimistic anthem “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life.” Brian’s release led to intense controversy from religious leaders seeking an excuse to cry blasphemy on whatever, and the controversy helped the film become an even bigger hit, bringing Monty Python back to the spotlight ten years after their show premiered. In 1980 they released their last studio album, Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Record, and in 1982 came their first and only concert film, recorded live at the Hollywood Bowl.
They released their final feature film, Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life, in 1983. A sketch film that covered the stages of man, Meaning Of Life included such highlights as the Catholic-baiting “Every Sperm Is Sacred” song and the infamous “Mr. Creosote” scene in which an obese man vomits all over an upscale restaurant. The following year, Meaning Of Life won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
The Pythons unofficially disbanded after Meaning Of Life – they all agree a reunion shouldn’t be attempted without every last surviving member, and every time a sizable offer comes up, they just can’t collectively agree whether or not to pursue it. The last time all six of them were on camera together was for the 1989 retrospective special Parrot Sketch Not Included, produced and hosted by Steve Martin, at the end of which Martin asked “Where are they now?” and answered, “They’re here in this cupboard.” He opened the cupboard behind him to reveal them all squeezed in together, and in typical Python fashion closed it after less than two seconds.
By the time that was filmed, Chapman’s health was failing severely. He was diagnosed with a rare spinal cancer in 1988, and died in his hospital bed on October fourth, 1989, on the eve of Python’s twentieth anniversary. In his eulogy, Cleese said, “Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard, I hope he fries” then explained what a dishonor it would’ve been to recognize Chapman’s memory without shocking people somehow.
Individually, the surviving Pythons have kept busy. Cleese created Fawlty Towers and wrote and starred in the blockbuster 1988 comedy A Fish Called Wanda. Palin and Jones created the BBC adventure/comedy series Ripping Yarns, and Palin hosted a long series of probing travel documentaries. Gilliam gained worldwide acclaim as the film director behind masterpieces like Brazil, Twelve Monkeys and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Eric Idle created “The Rutles” with Neil Innes for a notorious NBC mockumentary, and kept the Python name alive by writing the 2005 Tony-Award winning musical Spamalot.