Monty Python's Flying Circus - Classic or Dud?

well, speeding then falling over

'the seen of the crime' nice

go off to yr Goodies thread already

I remember my ex-brother-in-law gave me a *tape of "Silence" by Michael Mantler with this photo on the cover, which he'd labelled, l-to-r, Robert Wyatt, Carla Bley, Kevin Coyne, Michael Mantler:

https://dvd-fever.co.uk/dvd-fever/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/the-goodies-featureda.jpg

(*we did get on, in spite of this)

warning: personal anecdotes time.

1. inspired by repeated listenings of a dubbed copy of my friend's cassette of MP's the final rip off comp, i recorded my own comedy sketches tape. it was probably no more than 4 or 5 sketch ideas, but i sequenced them, voiced the characters, etc. this was probably ca. '89. i only recall 2 of the ideas. in one, a famous literary critic is on a radio show to discuss (pausing to recall the novel...) (ah!) hardy's return of the native. he gets called out for instead just reading the back of a hardy boys book. the other one i remember was this week's episode of "dictionary reading for the blind," in which i pick up where we left off last episode just reading through the dictionary. my voice fades and the music comes up. the end. really shitty stuff, but what i wouldn't give to have this tape still.

2. i participated pretty heavily for a couple of years in the NFL (national forensic league). my specialty was HI (humorous interpretation, or humorous interp if you're in the know). you got like 10 minutes to present your piece. do all the voices if there are any. etc. in 11th grade i got 2nd place in the state (missippi) on the strength of my performance of "four yorkshiremen." it won me a trip to nationals that summer in san jose. only trouble was they required material to be published in written form and submitted. i couldn't find anywhere where that sketch was transcribed/published. i did, however, find "crunchy frog" published in written form somewhere. so i did that one at nationals and failed miserably. there was a great dance party for all of us, though, and the dj played all my faves of that time: "hippy chick," "enjoy the silence," etc.

go off to yr Goodies thread already

sorry this is now a Goodies thread

I can't understand why this episode hasn't been repeated. What could go wrong?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_Roots

Funny how little TV Python I'd seen when I wrote a thesis school project on them (CSE Drama, only the middle-class kids got to do the O-level). Fortunately, I could borrow Roger Wilmut's From Fringe to Flying Circus for weeks on end from the library, to lift sections from verbatim. And then shoehorn in references to Comic Strip and Alexei Sayle, which didn't work at all. I dimly remember the Cleeseless 4th series when it went out (or soon-after repeat) and only saw the early "good" stuff around '87, when BBC ran the lot again. I knew the films and the records best at 15, I suppose.

I’ve fussed abt this on ilx before but it’s pertinent here too: we laugh at things for many reasons, but two of them that don’t really coincide are surprise and comfortable familiarity.

MP is very nearly 50 years old, and its ideas are even more pervasive than its actual material these days. I first saw eps (airing in real time) in maybe 1971- 72, when I was 11 or 12. Someone that age today couldn’t possibly watch a sketch — semi-chaotic TV version or slicked-up film version — and be startled into hilarity by the style, I don’t think… as you still could by watching British TV at the end of the 60s. We primarily laugh at it because what’s funny in it reminds of enjoying ourselves in past times — and this isn’t at all a bad thing! but it does also mean that the er difficult elements grate a lot more than they did back in the days when it was genuinely busy puncturing professional staidness, at a formal level as much as anything.

As some of you are aware — promo shill alert klaxon — I’ve been working on a book for the last few years, an anthology of stuff talking about the UK music press from the 1960s to the early 1980s. One key development in this story is how NME converted from a failing pop-focused early 70s trade rag to the best-selling voice-of-underground-youth UK rock paper — which it did in 1973-74. In May 1974, it included a free flexidisc 45 on the cover: Monty Python’s ‘Tiny Black Round Thing’ — which entirely fitted in with its new editorial ethos (as well the tastes of the readership).*

Because among other things it had cemented its turnaround in direction by a full-on assault on the writer-readers fourth wall, using endless self-reflexive MP-ish tricks in headlines and standfirsts and coverlines and captions to draw the reader into the process of making a weekly paper, including self-deprecating gags about how headlines and captions get decided, plus running jokes (often via editorial interpolation — ed.) about writers as recognisable characters whose views and behaviour you could poke regular affectionate fun at. This wasn’t new to the world of publishing — editors and writers were often also Marvel fans well aware of Stan Lee’s ‘Bullpen Bulletins’ — but it revolutionised the tone of the UK rock weeklies, and set it strongly against the dominant “view from nowhere”, which permeated establishment media. So there was a kind of pellmell anti-officious surrealism suddenly at work, right there among the very extremely sober work of explaining why the Groundhogs were better than Blodwyn Pig.

So yes, anyway — this is an immediate subcultural effect of MP in the UK, which tells you something about the very widespread receptiveness to it, at the level of the teenaged political unconscious.

•It wasn’t actually the first UK rock publication to do this! In 1972, when NME was still flailing re its identity, the underground UK rock monthly ZigZag put the ’Teach Yourself Heath’ MP flexidisc on its cover, a kind of linguaphone parody of the then-prime minister’s very imitable (and widely imitated) voice patterns.

^ Good stuff.

I think I said it somewhere else on ILX, but worth mentioning here, football fans singing "Spot the Looney" to the tune of "Son of Your Father" - I'm not sure you can't get more 1970s UK than that.

RIP Terry Jones. You and the lads warped me forever at 14. I've met Michael and John, but never you nor Graham. A great writer/performer/director for a timeless team. Thanks Jonesy. pic.twitter.com/ZXxXpgkNL0

— Dennis Perrin (@DennisThePerrin) January 22, 2020

R.I.P., heaven needed two sheds.

I saw a Jones appearance at a Museum of Broadcasting thing on Python, likely in the '90s, with Idle and Palin. They had cardboard cutouts of the other three onstage.

Someone asked how they each felt about "being an icon" and Jones said, "I don't mind being a painting in a Russian Orthodox church."

Unless that was Idle.

RIP

Sir Bedivere - rest well good soldier!

RIP

RIP

this sketch makes me laugh so hard every time i see it, and the accent Jones does is so hilarious to me

https://youtu.be/saY10AWXLIY

This made me tear up

I was lost, on my way to an audition in 1992. Rather desperately, I stopped a man for directions. He started to explain but then said it would be easier to show me.He walked me there,told some stories,then came in to charm the casting director because I was late. #TerryJonesRIP

— Minnie Driver (@driverminnie) January 22, 2020

Here's one of my favorite deep-ish cut Python sketches, where Jones is both the straight man and one of the eccentrics, trying on all the wacky voices personally. And you get to hear him try to wrap his Welsh accent around the word "burglary" https://t.co/BGfo5bhzde

— Matt Prigge (@mattprigge) January 22, 2020

I find myself singing Sgt. Duckie's song rather often.

Harry "Snapper" Organs is in many ways a personal hero of mine tbh

A guy in my work has being going on all week about how much Terry Jones looked like Robert De Niro, so much so, that I almost started to believe it myself. And it turns out he's not alone!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3pzpCxz2FE

the one on the left is robert de niro

Feeling ruminative today.

Terry Jones was my favorite Python.

I guess that makes me some sort of comedy nerd. First that I have a "favorite Python", and second that it's not Cleese or Idle, who were the most gregarious and immediately noteworthy members of the group. Certainly when I was growing up obsessively rewatching "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (like many AMABs of my generation) I had no idea about anybody but Cleese and Idle.

I don't know if Monty Python is still funny. Most comedy is of a time and a place and outside that time and place works less well. There's bits of it I find appalling. As in a significant chunk of my decades of finding myself grotesque and pathetic can be traced back to "The Lumberjack Song", and yet I still think that song is funny.

Fuck do I know about humor. Less and less, less and less, but more about history as I grow older. Terry Jones... he was an actual historian. As in had stuff published in scholarly journals. The bit where Arthur met the peasants, who claimed to be something called an "anarchosyndicalist collective", which in my younger days I found hilarious mainly for its gratuitous sesquipedalian loquaciousness, turned out to be fairly cutting-edge revisionist historiography - in "Medieval Britain" there was, arguably, no small number of people who really wouldn't have known who their "king" was. Now that is pretty fucking funny.

Not to be rude, but I don't get the sense that Jones was that great a professional historian. I mean, he didn't say a lot of shit that was out and out _wrong_ like a lot of the popular historians do, but he had certain axes to grind, and his work seemed to be mainly focused on supporting his theories. Not crackpot theories, by any means, but minority theories, theories that still haven't won acceptance to this day. An uncharitable reader might even call them "marginal". I appreciate the beauty of the worldview he was trying to propound, what he saw as obscured truths he was trying, through diligent scholarship, to reveal, even if the historical evidence for them is not conclusive.

I get the impression that, as a historian, Jones knew just enough to be dangerous. That's usually a dismissal, but it worked perfectly for him as a member of Monty Python.

second that it's not Cleese or Idle, who were the most gregarious and immediately noteworthy members of the group.

I'll give you Cleese, but how is Eric Idle more immediately noteworthy than the rest of Python? I would say Chapman and Palin are much more likely to have been favourites than Eric Idle - Chapman's like the Python fan's Python and everybody (in the UK at least) likes Michael Palin.

obsessively rewatching "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" I had no idea about anybody but Cleese and Idle.

this speaks to a very idiosyncratic viewing of this film alone, from which it would be folly to assume other viewers' perceptions. let alone to extend any assumption to the other films, performances, books, recordings and their primary output of a TV show, the final series of which did not even include Cleese.

The 'star' of the film is Graham Chapman! Same with "Life of Brian". I'm not even sure what Idle does in "Holy Grail" that is especially memorable?

brave sir robin ran away/bravely ran away away

(minstrel = neil innes, maybe that's where the feud began)

so it's a funny scene but the minstrel is what makes it funny

It’s hard to tell any of them apart in holy grail with the beards and helmets and such

idle was my favorite when i was little -- loved the smarm

ken buddha: a smile, two bangs and a religion

Thinking about Mattress Store and giggling to myself

I can see not especially taking note of Chapman in Grail, as he's m/l the straight man, and everyone else plays multiple roles (even Innes and Gilliam).

well maybe it wasn't the movie specifically but more the cultural millieu. i didn't see the tv series (maybe i saw "and now for something completely different"?) but i knew about the parrot sketch and the bookshop sketch and cheese shop sketch and the argument sketch (god do i fucking love the argument sketch), which are all sort of variations on the same thing, and the whole cringe comedy character of that imperious argumentative twit clicked with me so hard. also cleese was fucking tall so he stood out.

eric idle was just fucking loud in ways that were highly noticeable by teenage amabs.

I still can't tell Palin and Idle apart

the other thing about chapman is that he could sort of kind of act a little? cleese is cleese, idle is idle, chapman is king of the britons or a very naughty boy or, you know, whatever role he's playing.

Palin can act too imho.

Doesn't Idle collect the dead in Grail?

Idle was kind of the first Python to break out in the States (hosted SNL etc.), and he and Cheese had the most visible post-Python careers over here.

sure, palin can act, but in general i feel like there's a perfectly good reason chapman kept getting cast as the lead

Idle was kind of the first Python to break out in the States (hosted SNL etc.), and he and Cheese had the most visible post-Python careers over here.

― a bevy of supermodels, musicians and Lena Dunham (C. Grisso/McCain)

can't tell if that's ducking autocorrect or if you were drumpfing him

Idle was kind of the first Python to break out in the States (hosted SNL etc.), and he and Cheese had the most visible post-Python careers over here.

That sounds about right. Cleese can act, he was quite established before Python. Idle can't and Jones couldn't.

Idle was kind of the first Python to break out in the States (hosted SNL etc.)

Palin hosted as many times (4), but, yeah, Idle was in early - twice in the 1976-77 run. Also introduced Kate Bush in late '78!

I loved the Idle rants as a teenager... Bleedin' Watney's Red Barrel, etc...

Didn't know that Palin hosted, and yeah that Cleese thing was autocorrect.

His family's surname was originally Cheese, but his father had thought it was embarrassing and used the name 'Cleese' when he enlisted in the Army during the First World War; he changed it officially by deed poll in 1923.

the parrot sketch and the bookshop sketch and cheese shop sketch and the argument sketch (god do i fucking love the argument sketch)

― revenge of the jawn (rushomancy), Sunday, January 26, 2020 9:24 AM (two hours ago)

I still can't tell Palin and Idle apart

― Frederik B, Sunday, January 26, 2020 9:27 AM (two hours ago)

seems like maybe rusho couldn't really (or Chapman) either tbh :)

Idle's ambient profile was probably higher in the US due to the Rutles spin-off doco and sitcom appearances and more American-audience-friendly films than the others (plus eventually moving there).

Tbh, don’t remember Rutlemania ever really breaking out in any significant sense in the American market.

gilliam worst. not really a python tbh.

idle next worst, despite good turns and writing plenty of the good sequences. introduced innes and generally a shitty influence, and intrinsically unfunny in any post python effort

cleese limited to cleese but cleese properly deployed is amazing and untouchable

palin likeable, talented, works well with others, adaptable, prone to corny when not countered

jones just off the wall enough and beats palin by doing a lot of what the former does but less predictably and often with a bit of genius skew.

straight man chapman the least straight of all, the quantum leap of illogic that drove connections to new direction that otherwise wouldve been sketches no more inspired than any oxbridge efforts at zany or class or pun sketch comedy.

anyone who argues against python in general because of their ubiquity amongst teenage boys or whatever can do the same thing that anyone who rejects the beatles on the same lines- die roaring

<3 u deems

Good post

No way to argue honestly

thread is a decent argument vs Python fans