Editorial: Who is Monty Python?

It was this time last year that the five remaining members of the Monty Python troupe presented their farewell performances at the O2. And while their body of work under the name 'Monty Python' essentially ended with 1983's The Meaning of Life, the team has continued to endure in various forms for over 45 years now. Acknowledging founding member Graham Chapman's death in 1989, the Monty Python team has actually existed longer without Chapman than with.


So what is it about this group of comedy scholars that just seems to continue to feel 'currently active'? Even in a performance of Spamalot involving nobody of the troupe, it still feels like Mr. Python is present and irrepressible as ever.


When you look at The Rolling Stones, a band that has been together since 1962, it somehow doesn't feel like the n factor that made them The Rolling Stones is present anymore. In the same way, The Beatles ended when they ended, a full decade before John Lennon's death. Monty Python is a curiosity that continues to thrive, even in spite of its own creators trying to shut it down.


To figure out how this strange creature keeps kicking, it may be necessary to understand what Monty Python is; no easy task. You could probably pose the question to a single member of the troupe twice in one day and get conflicting answers. You can't really nail down the Python anymore than you can nail down a solid definition of comedy, but that doesn't mean the attempt would produce nothing of value. So let's look at it.

The Larch's Seeds

You could make a case that much of Great Britain's current comedic sensibilities are a direct byproduct of World War II. When you look at the programmes which resonated so loudly in Europe that we heard it here in the States, there is a noticeable preoccupation with death. Perhaps this was also a reflection of the British Empire's decline, but when you look at the classic Doctor Who serials, there is a lot of death that nobody reacts to.

When you tie these elements into the teenage rampage of the sixties leading into Beatlemania, it's almost like watching the phoenix emerge from the ashes. Whatever rebelliousness was happening in British culture at the time also coincided with the emergence of television, a medium seeking out voices.

David Frost, a man who probably deserves both the praise and criticism he receives, inevitably emerged as the very face and personality of television. The Frost Report tapped the veritable Who's Who of British comedy writers who would go on to become the vital organs of the entire generation of comedy as we know it, including the future Pythons.

Eric Idle once identified John Cleese as the 'head' of Python, and Terry Jones as the 'heart'. Much of the creative tension between those two forces produced the epic flavor of surreal comedy that gave us the name Monty Python; absolute nonsense, yet somehow effectively defined by what the beast felt like it was.

Oxford vs. Cambridge

On the one side you had the Palin-Jones sketches, comprised of Oxford educated friends Michael Palin and Terry Jones. Their style tended to be right brained, with a strong sense of visual presentation, and a lot of off the wall ideas. Jones would go on to direct the Python films, and it was his passion for the overall feel of the show which molded the individual episodes into their own 'thing'.

What you can recognize the most in the Oxford boys on the Myers-Briggs scale is an overwhelming sense of intuitiveness. The Palin-Jones team could easily be credited with giving Monty Python his childish delight, be it innocent or naughty. Like a child, there is the thrill of discovery; a belief that if you peel back the layers of reality and let the silliness run rampant, the world will undoubtedly become a somewhat more amiable place.

That optimism was not present among the Cambridge chaps. Both of these men were taller, and had the look of the authority figures Monty Python would be lampooning, and perhaps by unconscious effect their sketches tended to be based on the humor of adulthood. Graham Chapman and John Cleese wrote sketches very verbally (well, Cleese did), concise and carefully structured. In Cleese's account, any sketch that started with an ordinary situation and ended with people screaming at each other was a Chapman-Cleese sketch.

I find this dichotomy in Monty Python to be particularly fascinating. Unlike the Oxford team, who welcomed a sense of chaos in its harmlessness, the Cambridge team seemed to show a genuine fear of that x-factor. Their beast behind the veil wasn't a whimsical creature, but a destructive force that could barely be contained.

There are legendary tales of Cleese and Jones locking horns. Probably each man represented an insurmountable obstacle to the other. But some wonderful things happened during that clash.

The Bridge Troll

I don't think Terry Gilliam would mind the title.

Gilliam was in a unique position, in that he never had to submit anything to the group for approval. He simply did whatever he needed to do to fill the time which had been allotted to him for an episode. Gilliam's animations may very well have rescued Holy Grail from losing the audience's attention span.

Terry Gilliam, with his college aged American sensibilities in the sixties, had a spirit of anarchy (which seems to continue into his seventies). There was probably no comedian more equipped to serve as the bridge between right brained Oxford and left brained Cambridge.

His animations may have represented (in its purest form) that stuff that made Monty Python who he is. It's significant that many of the crude cutouts Gilliam used were taken from respectable paintings and then crammed into a meat grinder. There was some real envelope pushing violence Monty Python got away with on television because of Gilliam. It was almost like a stream of raw material that flowed between Cambridge and Oxford; that creek where the Pythons came to play.

So I Became a Waiter

There's a reason I've saved Eric Idle for last. When you think of Monty Python, you probably remember the dead parrot, the silly walk (Cleese-Chapman contributions), the Spanish Inquisition, the Lumberjack song (Jones-Palin sketches) and the Gilliam animated title sequence(s). What of Eric Idle?

There's Nudge, Nudge of course and a majority of the Python songs, but it's a fair question (on the surface) to ask how needed Idle really was to the overall quality of the comedic entity. Well to skip a bit, I'm of the opinion that the whole reason Python worked the way it did was because of Eric Idle.

Watching several post-Python interviews with the surviving members, I keep hearing Idle being referred to as the most philosophical of the Pythons. So what the hell does that mean? Translated into comedy, Idle was the one who truly understood timing. His contribution came in the form of an intuitive ordering of structure; cutting this sketch off here, bringing this linking bit in, cutting to the animation and so forth. When the other Pythons spoke straight into the lens it was like they were speaking to the camera. Idle's eye contact felt like he was actually addressing the audience.

The Circus needed a ringmaster to actually function, and Idle may have taken the role on more selflessly than any other ringmaster in entertainment. Unlike David Frost, who was a master of looking like he had written the jokes he was telling, Idle really wrote his monologues and really understood the ambiguous reptile named Monty. In essence, Eric Idle served as the link between the chaos and the audience, and the pieces of Monty Python would never have held together without him.

And Now the Punchline...

The question of who Monty Python is remains on the table and it is doubtful anyone will agree with my answer, but here it goes. I believe Monty Python is the soul of comedy. Comedy existed well before the lads got hold of it and will continue to exist for as long as the human psyche has flaws. There was a living energy that flowed through the great comedians long before history was written down. It flowed through the Marx Brothers and the Muppets and the Satellite of Love. But in the late sixties, through the brilliance of six comedians in their top form who were touched so deeply by the muse, comedy was given a name.

And it had a much nicer liberty bell bong to it than Bunn, Whackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot.