Monty Python's Flying Circus - Classic or Dud?

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/a-night-of-round-table-with-monty-python/

Responding to a question about how to tell which Pythons wrote which sketches, Mr. Cleese said that his work with Mr. Chapman was fairly clean and “finished short,” while Mr. Palin and Mr. Jones’s skits were “prolonged,” and Mr. Idle’s were “highly verbal” and “disappeared up their own funnel.” (Mr. Palin said his material could be recognized because it produced laughter.)

Other exchanges were downright bizarre, even by Python standards. Mr. Cleese read a card that asked, “What about that very funny thing that happened at Auschwitz?” This yielded an anecdote about the troupe’s visit to Germany when they traveled a concentration camp — recollections differed as to which one — only to discover that it was closed to visitors. Mr. Chapman suggested they say that they were Jewish, but the group was still denied entry.

The format also yielded a couple of authentically touching moments. Mr. Gilliam read a question submitted by 10-year-old Talia Lindner, asking if she could perform her version of the Spanish Inquisition skit for the Pythons. Mr. Gilliam accepted, and up to the front of the theater strode little Talia, in glasses and blue jeans. After a deep breath or five, she rapidly performed all the characters in the scene in just under a minute (“I didn’t expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition”; “Hold on, I’ll come in again”), drawing roars of laughter from the troupe followed by enthusiastic handshakes.

I'd heard that Auschwitz story before, forget where...

Haha visualizing that ten year old girl has me chuckling out loud

nytimes:

Chapman suggested they say that they were Jewish, but the group was still denied entry.

wired:

"Graham (Chapman) said, 'Tell them we’re Jewish,' he recalled, to a now completely inconsolable audience. 'They let us in.'"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmWN9fwmOKM

I remember being thirteen or so and seeing that on PBS...I had no idea wtf was happening. "When will they start speaking English?"

i only recently found out about German Python. Palin's and Cleese's German are actually quite good as far as i can tell.

This has been out on DVD for ages here. First ep is all German, second is all English. Fascinating stuff.

Oh god, a guy I was dating broght over the german python dvd once, back in 2002. I got rabidly drunk while watching it and so dont recall most of it.

Chapman would have approved

Heh :D

This has been out on DVD for ages here

it's been out on VHS here for longer

Huh.

But on another note.

Eric Idle is basically like "can my part in this be me singing while fucking a large pile of money? no? then piss off"

When did Gilliam turn into Orson Welles?!

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/06/27/arts/JPPYTHON3/JPPYTHON3-articleInline.jpg

No, no, no. He is clearly Sigmund Freud.

Excellent! I like the story about how he recorded this in one night at Nilsson's place. The usual schtick about that group of party fiends (Lennon, Moon, Nilsson, Ringo, Chapman etc) being on a years-long career-killing bender often overlooks some pretty creative stuff.

I would rather see a docfilm about the LoBrian contretemps.

Comedian Steve Punt will star as Eric Idle

especially for rhyming verses

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/aug/13/monty-python-life-brian-bbc

Steve Punt has always reminded me a bit of Eric Idle.

um

would love to see the full-length version of cleese and palin's face-off with muggeridge one day. have only seen clips in docs, and it seems a corker.

getting repeated next month iirc? spods have compiled 45 minutes of it from all the excerpts in various docos over the years but this may be its first ever actual full rebroadcast

there's no "face-off" to speak of tho. muggeridge is an utter tool and the increasingly hurt and pissed-off cleese and palin just zing the senile old twat into oblivion.

awesome news. that's kind of what i'm after tbh nv.

"...We thought about doing jokes about Jesus. Trying to book a table for 12 for the last supper. 'I can do you three 4s. Or you can come in tomorrow night?' 'No, it's got to be tonight'..."

"jesus h christ: lust for glory"

"not a funny building" tbh

Palin in partic claims to have been completely surprised by the vitriol directed at the movie. And tho I think they were being a little disingenuous when they said that they weren't laughing at Christianity, it should be pretty obvious to the feeblest feeb that the man-made fuckery of religious bureaucracy is the real target. Muggeridge, like a lot of late-convert Catholics, doesn't realise something that the church had sussed many years earlier: the best way to deflect satire is to pretend that the work is deeply religious at heart. (Obv it ain't)

Jones said at the end of the one of those clip show thingys - "It was't blasphemous, it was heretical..."

Rather more than a clip show thingy actually. This was on the Beeb a couple of years ago.
http://youtu.be/eC5rhnuMPz8

Great clip.

The new movie then:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jan/27/monty-python-film-reunion-absolutely-anything

Terry Gilliam cast doubt on whether a reunion would ever be successfully achieved. "We all have our own careers now … the BBC put us on 10 years ago, and it was an hour of mediocrity … the work wasn't what it should be."

He means that Monty Python Night thing hosted by Eddie Izzard, I presume. He's right, the new sketches in that were pretty mediocre.

watching series four atm, move towards making each installment a more complete episode with a theme or two running through it works very well i think

mm, where do you stand on 'The Cycling Tour' from Series 3? it's years since i saw it but i thought it worked pretty great; one long 30 minute sketch as it were. i think they put it into the 'failed experiment' box, or some of them did anyway as they never did that again.

i think that was the first departure in that direction, yeah (tho 'ethel the frog' with spiny norman and the krays substitutes was probably close to it too). i didn't like that one iirc but i could revisit.

i think it maybe turned out a lot like one of palin's whatchoocallem tales?

rippin yarns, that's the one

Palin & Jones wrote Cycling Tour, also wrote Ripping Yarns

only caught the ripping yarns last year, varying quality but not bad at all

Cycling Tour is one of my favorite episodes.

"¿Su mujer se enrolla? ¡Seguro que sí, seguro que sí!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyKGxwmQRXY

Ok so

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24999401

"Idle went on to create spoof Beatles band The Rutles and wrote the hit Spamalot musical."

Neil Innes could not be reached for comment.

Eh, those reunion bits for the thirtieth anniversary special programming in the UK were pretty unspecial, and I can't imagine things being any better now. All feels like yet another Eric Idle attempt to keep functioning somehow.

the reunion sketches were dire yeah. supposedly it was always Palin who didn't fancy a reunion much, seems he's come round to the idea.
it must be the early 1980s since they all last performed together onstage.

Palin's diaries are really good value, apropos of nowt.

true say. got a bit of a shock in Volume 2 when his sister killed herself :/

NO SPOILERS!