The Python Primer
By Kristin Friedrich
 In no particular order, the comedy troupe Monty Python has inspired a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor, a computer programming language, a reinvention of sketch comedy, a philosophy book, and the names of a prehistoric snake, an asteroid, and the “spam” folder in your e-mail account.
All that, from six funny men who found each other not long after college. Graham Chapman, John Cleese and Eric Idle were friends at Cambridge — the university that Monty Python’s pseudo-academic verbosity was attributed to, or blamed on, depending on your affection for wordplay. Michael Palin and Terry Jones came out of Oxford, where they did physical, lowbrow skits while touring in the Oxford Revue. American expatriate Terry Gilliam was invited to the group by virtue of wacky, subversive animations, which seemed to fit right in with the group’s emerging aesthetic.
After deciding on the name Monty Python — mostly because they just thought it sounded funny — the late-night BBC comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus tripped onto the airwaves in 1969.
Unlike Any Other Comedy Sketch
In it, the Pythons took their two-sided university comedy, added a heavy dose of absurdism, and then started breaking narrative rules. Most comedy sketches on TV at the time were structured around the finale punch line, but the Pythons weren’t caged in by the pursuit of the “ba-dum-dum” moment. At the end of their skits, they would walk off stage, weave in a Gilliam animation, switch to another storyline with no transition whatsoever, or look at the camera and chat about how silly or awful the current sketch was. It was a new rhythm for comedy — these sketches unfurled with less punctuation, and more anarchy.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus spanned four seasons in England, and then in 1975, a Dallas PBS executive found some episodes on the shelf and acquired the series to put on the air. The show ran on PBS in the States through the rest of the ’70s and ’80s, and though it’s impossible to pinpoint why, galvanized the underrated American nerd population.
Youths who were already dabbling in surreal John Lennon lyrics and the British sci-fi show Dr. Who quickly embraced the Pythons. The show packed literary references, nods to counterculture politics, and quotable riffs and rants — but there was also sheer silliness. Since it didn’t appear on mainstream television channels, it had a nerd-friendly air of inaccessibility. And to Americans, there has always been a special resonance when a group of Brits talk nonsense — we tend not to be able to resist presumed pretension turned upside down.
From Sketches to the First Movie
Talk of a movie started up, and fortunately for the producers, young nerds don’t have a monopoly on Python fandom. Some early supporters had deep pockets —British record companies and bands like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd jumped on board as investors.
With a small sum raised, the troupe headed out to the Scottish countryside to make a film called Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a compilation of sketches bound loosely — very loosely — by an Arthurian quest plot.
The film finds King Arthur recruiting Knights of the Round Table and setting out to find the grail. But this Arthur (played by Chapman) is no hero. He’s a fatuous chainmail dandy, clueless except for an uncanny knowledge about swallows. Sir Lancelot the Brave (Cleese) is so brave that he’s known to accidentally slay whole wedding parties. Sir Galahad the Pure (Palin) justifies his name by nervously absconding from a castle full of oversexed maidens.
And those are just some of the portrayals. Each of the Pythons plays several characters, and many crew members, girlfriends, babies and local college students were recruited for parts as well.
That’s not to say it was smooth sailing, the Grail shoot. Cameras broke, castles that had been squared away as filming locations were deemed off limits, co-directors Gilliam and Jones bickered, and Chapman was suffering from delirium tremens. But as is often the case with absurdists, obstacles serve as inspiration.
Since there was no budget for horses, the troupe mimed riding and clapped hollow coconuts together — on screen — to simulate the clacking of hoofs. When the Department of the Environment of Scotland declared, according to Jones, the Python sensibility “inconsistent with the dignity of the fabric of the buildings,” filmmakers had to scramble to find privately-owned castles. This was advantageous, however, because now the directors had more freedom to shoot in the interiors, and the cardboard prop castles that were used in the backgrounds became a running joke. The hardships were also advantageous for the film’s following and staying power. The more Python fans knew about the shoot, the more they felt in on the joke.
From Movie to Stage Musical Comedy
Spamalot, with a book and lyrics written by Python member Eric Idle, employs all the classic Pythonisms. Insert some absurdity, and then discuss it in an erudite way. Make authority figures look like imbeciles, but not through shame or abuse — let them reveal their own idiocy and not a clue in the world about that idiocy. Get some semblance of plot going, then stop it dead in its tracks by looking at the audience, or at each other, and breaking character.
The production’s title comes from a lyric in a Grail musical number: “We eat ham, and jam, and Spam a lot.” Not only are there not a lot of words that rhyme with Camelot, but the lyric also tipped its hat to a sketch from the TV show, which featured restaurant patrons and Vikings singing endlessly about spam. (Though there is some debate among entomologists, the e-mail term “spam” comes from the skit — designating something that is repeated to the point of revulsion).
On screen and on stage, the bits are one of a kind. Prat falls, scatological outbursts, shame, fish out of water premises, profanity and your garden variety head and groin injuries are comedy bread and butter. But the Pythons weren’t particularly interested in any of that. They gave us things we had never seen and would never see again — a fluffy rabbit wreaking bloodthirsty havoc, a gibberish-spewing knight, and a Frenchman who taunted adversaries with parental comparisons to hamsters and the scent of elderberries.
There were no rules, no boundaries, no traditions to uphold — the opening credits of Grail were a gag, the actors can be seen to stifle laughter onscreen, and sacred cows like cinematic authenticity and the Arthur legend were pounced upon.
That sense of freedom need not only apply to filmic devices and comedic sensibilities — it can be applied to waking life. Cleese touched upon this at Chapman’s memorial service in 1989. Touched upon it, that is, after he first dropped the mother of all cuss words into his eulogy because he was sure his late friend would have thought a British funeral the perfect opportunity.
But Cleese went on to talk about shock, and how though it upsets some people, “it gives others a momentary joy of liberation, as we realized in that instant that the social rules that constrict our lives so terribly are not actually very important.”
The Pythons and the nerds might actually have it right. |
