by David Morgan
This had happened much earlier, on the records and the books. It was divided up as to who should do what; Terry Jones and myself went to records and almost exclusively were the ones who got those together, and Eric was the editor of the books. If somebody didn’t take on that role, things, would never get done.
Were those jobs taken on by choice, or by default because no one else was interested?
PALIN: Well, a bit of both: by default because no one else was particularly interested in doing all the work in putting albums together, but also by choice because there was a feeling where we knew how we could do it best. And I had a recording studio, I’d invested in Redwood Recording Studios with Andre Jaquemain, our engineer, so there was some interest there.
But I think it was largely again to do with commitment to the group. Terry was totally committed to the group, and I was working with Terry, therefore I was doing a lot of work in conjunction with Terry. John was not committed to the group; John didn’t really care whether albums were made. I think he was very happy to contribute, and he was extremely happy when they were successful, [but] John was looking elsewhere; he had Fawlty Towers on his mind at that time. And Eric’s interest was the book, and that was marvelous; Eric took on the editing, getting the material together, discussing with the rest of us what the book might be, suggesting an idea, getting sessions together, which would never have happened if he hadn’t done it; again, that was Eric’s choice.
But the feeling I had was it was always Eric and Terry and myself who could see the potential in Python, all the other things that could be done. I don’t think John ever really believed it.
IDLE: The first Python book Gilliam wouldn’t help at all, just grumbled, so I got a friend to raid his house and steal some of his illustrations. I then wrote up some of the sketches in other forms.
I enjoy working on my own on Python material. I love playing with form, putting different types of paper in the book and frightening the publisher. I would then send some of the stuff to the others, who would realize they had better actually contribute something or this book would go out without much of their stuff in, and then they would. Sort of the same thing I tried with the Web site, Pythonline. Will I ever learn?
Why do you think Python humor is so idiosyncratic, even compared to the work done by its members away from the group?
PALIN: I think there’s a danger in Pythons analyzing their own work. I think we shouldn’t do it. Anyone else wants to do it, that’s fine. I sort of feel we produced the material, it’s out there; once one tries to sort of analyze why we’re funny, I think it’s—I think it’s impossible to answer for a start, and also I think once we unpick ourselves and give guidelines, in a sense it takes away from the audience their choice of how they react to Python.
And also the joke is so many different things. In Python it isn’t just the words; maybe seventy percent are the words and maybe ten percent are a sort of look or gesture, something that just happened on that particular recording. There’s the mystery of it. There were certain things which happened, you know. You do two takes of things, [and] there would be one which was funny and one which wasn’t so funny, for the tiniest of reasons, the tiniest of reasons—just an edge more urgency in a certain one because we’d been told that there was a car coming and we’ve got to shoot the scene before the car passes, something like that, so there would be an edge to it which may just make it funny whereas if it were just the words it wouldn’t have been.
Despite your differing styles, did you find a common thread among the material that each one of you brought to Python?
PALIN: A strand which I think is in a lot of Python humor, from all the various sources but perhaps particularly from Terry and myself, is human inadequacy—the fact that things don’t always work out right. The grander, magnificent scheme which is set up by mere humans, you know, will go wrong. And in a sense the characters which John and Graham have written, like in the “Dead Parrot” sketch, is just a man giving lots of excuses, and somebody who knows what he wants and not being able to get it. That’s a similar kind of humor: you set something up and then some tiny little thing destroys it completely, because that’s the way human beings are. I mean, you can be in a solemn occasion where trumpets play, something like that, [then] someone farts at the back, and immediately the atmosphere collapses. Because we are all on the edge of awareness of absurdity. It’s just a nice vein we used to tap.
In Holy Grail that’s constantly happening to Arthur and his troupe; they’d be very kingly and yet something would happen, they’ll talk to some toiling peasant in this very hail-fellow way: “Old man, tell us the way.”
“I’m thirty-seven, I’m not old.”
“Yes, okay, we don’t want to get into that…”
I think that’s a great strand of humor, which is dragging all those pretensions down to a certain level.
Arthur’s being inconvenienced, and has to come up with ways to deal with that.
PALIN: Yes, I think we were quite fond of that, Terry and myself. But John and Graham also wrote that in their sketches, as did Eric. It was a very common Python thread.
But I think Terry and myself had a more visual sense—this is a slightly simplified way of saying it. John and Graham very much concentrated on a particular exchange: a war of words between characters was important to them, the wonderful logicality of it. John and Graham were not really interested in how you would build up a grand sequence. I love the start of movies, those magnificent tracking shots—so does Terry—the things you can do with a camera and a landscape and people and all that, and it seemed wonderful that we could do it with Python—more on the films than on the television series, because we had control—[where] we could play these wonderful jokes. We could have Boom! “34 A.D.” comes up. “Just after tea time.” “…Well, almost tea time.” Then things would be crossed out on the screen.
John and Graham were not particularly interested in where a sketch was set; it was usually an office or behind a counter of a shop somewhere. It would be a superb sketch, but the visual side didn’t matter to them that much.
JONES: As soon as you start to try and analyze, ask why it works, why it doesn’t work, you can’t do it anymore. The only reason for Python is to be funny. I suppose if you have a consistent outlook and point of view, your attitudes come over even if you are writing nonsense, but there is certainly no conscious effort to put over a message.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY…THE SAME?
I’ve Had an Idea for the Next Movie I’m Going to Produce and I Want You Boys to Write It
In 1970 the group formed a joint venture, Python Productions Ltd., with the intention to further exploit their material in other media and markets, including the cinema.
CLEESE: Victor Lownes, head of Playboy in London, called me and said, “Would you like to come and have lunch?” And at the lunch, he said, “I’ve just been watching Python”—these were the first episodes—“I think it’s the funniest thing I’ve seen on television for years, but American television is much too conservative to put this stuff out. But there are two thousand college cinemas and this stuff will be wonderful for American college students, so let’s make a movie.” Victor put half the money up and he found someone else to put up the other half.
MACNAUGHTON: I had to ask permission from the BBC to be allowed to take eight weeks off, unpaid leave, to do it. The BBC were happy to do that and that was quite nice. I was lucky.
All the studio work was done in an old milk depot in North London, and then of course there was lots of exteriors in and around London. It was not an expensive production by any means. And of course it got the boys all a tremendous liking for film.
Nobody had the time to write new material—they wanted the picture at this date—but there were a few sketches that were going into the second series which we incorporated into the script for the film. For instance, the “Hungarian Phrasebook,” which appears in the second series, appeared first in And Now for Something
Completely Different.
I found it very interesting to do because film was different from television, totally different. I mean, the “Hell’s Grannies” on television is totally different-looking from the “Hell’s Grannies” in the film. You’ve got longer takes, you’ve got wider screen, it was all very interesting to do.
The funny thing is at the same time Playboy was putting money into Roman Polanski’s Macbeth. Now, I think Playboy is still making a little money out of And Now for Something Completely Different, but they’re not doing a penny out of Macbeth, I don’t know. That’s nothing to do with Shakespeare, by the way!
JONES: John’s chum Victor Lownes put the money up to do the film on the condition that we’d put in sketches he’d seen on TV and knew were funny. The criteria that was sort of handed down to us was it should be stuff that Vic had seen and heard the studio audience laughing at. And in the end I thought it was not a very good selection of material, because you end up sort of John and Mike doing sketches across a desk from each other.
“The Upper Class Twit of the Year Show.”
“The Dirty Fork” sketch.
The sets looked a bit tacky, I thought, on the film. And the sound quality is a little bid odd at times, a bit echoey [because] we built these sets in an old dairy. I don’t think the film is much of an improvement. But no, we were not trying to shoot it differently, very much the idea was to shoot this for the American audience. And Vic wanted to call it And Now for Something Completely Different, which we thought was a bit corny, but we said as long as it’s not shown over here we don’t mind. And then of course it came out over here, and it was all the old sketches that everybody had seen on TV, so we got a lot of stick for it—especially for calling it And Now for Something Completely Different!
CLEESE: I do remember an extraordinary experience: the first time we showed And Now for Something Completely Different, there was hilarious laughter up to fifty minutes, then the audience went quiet for twenty, twenty-five minutes, and then they came up again and finished very well. So we took all that middle material, put it at the beginning, and it all worked beautifully up to about fifty minutes, and then [the] audience got quiet! We discovered that whatever order we put the material in, at about fifty minutes they stopped laughing. And in order to get people to go with you past the fifty-minute mark they have to want to know what’s going to happen next. In other words, you have to have characters that they care about and a story they can enjoy and believe in. There’s a huge learning curve.
JONES: There was actually an instance where I can remember learning something—and that was when we had the “Dirty Fork” sketch, the waiter comes in and commits suicide and everything. We’d done it on TV and it had been really funny, and we redid it—same sketch, same actors—and we showed it at some Odeon somewhere, and nobody laughed. I thought it was really weird, we’d seen people laugh before and it doesn’t get a titter, and the only thing I could see was that Ian had put a muzak track over it, sort of posh restaurant muzak, and I thought maybe that’s just filling in all the gaps and just obliterating the film. We took the muzak off and then, when we showed it, people laughed at the sketch again.
CLEESE: It was extraordinary because the movie was a complete flop in America; some idiot designed a poster with a happy snake with a funny hat on, and the adults looked at it and thought, “Kids’ movie,” and nobody went. In fact, I believe the movie took in less than they spent on advertising—it was a total disaster. But it went well in England, where the sketches had already been transmitted, so it was all very scrambled!
In the second series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the group was even more confident and daring than in their first series, as evident in both the tightness of the editing and the breadth of their material. From the first show broadcast in September 1970 (in which Idle moderates a discussion of public housing between Chapman—“who is wearing a striking organza dress”—and a small patch of brown liquid), the second series avoided entirely the “sophomore jinx,” thus ensuring the Pythons’ position as Britain’s leading comic masters.
Among the highlights were Cleese’s infamous turn as the Minister of Silly Walks; the Spanish Inquisition, whose diabolical members burst in on the scene to persecute heresy—which they do by banishing their victims to “the Comfy Chair”; two Pepperpots musing about the penguin on top of their television (“If it came from the zoo it would have Property of the Zoo stamped on it.”); figures from paintings going on strike to protest conditions at the National Gallery (“Dad, it’s the man from ‘The Hay Wain’ by Constable here to see you!”); and the infamous “Undertaker” sketch. Among Gilliam’s more surreal animated bits were “Conrad Poohs and his Dancing Teeth,” the “Killer Cars,” and some wonderfully macabre examples of cannibalism.
Wenn 1st das Nunstück Git und Slotermeyer?
In 1971, the Pythons produced the first of two shows for Bavarian television. Very close in style to the BBC series (except that both episodes were entirely shot on film, with no performances before a studio audience), Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus was mostly original material with only a few hints of their BBC work (for example, Michael Palin sings “The Lumberjack Song” in German).
By its absence, the lack of a live audience reveals how effective was the Pythons’ skill in front of an audience, and is missed here. But there are compensating pleasures, including a nod to the Munich Olympic games (featuring such track events as the 100-Yards for People with No Sense of Direction); a football match between Greek and German philosophers; a study of grizzled old men panning—Klondike-style—for chickens; and “Little Red Riding Hood,” featuring Cleese as the diminutive heroine. Some of the material has been screened during breaks in the Pythons’ stage shows, and a fairy tale cowritten by Cleese and his then-wife Connie Booth was included on Monty Python’s Previous Record.
MACNAUGHTON: Michael Mills, who was Head of Comedy at that time, put a compilation of sketches from our first series into the Montreaux Festival and it was reasonably successful. The only thing was that during this little film of ours with all the strange pictures of torpedoes coming out of ships and all that stuff over a supposed sex scene between Terry Jones and Carol Cleveland, the Italian delegation called it obscene and walked out!
Cleese and Palin on the same side of a desk, in Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus.
And at Montreaux that year was Alfred Biôlek, who was a producer from Bavaria Films. He phoned me up in London and said, “What would you think of doing a show in conjunction with a Dutch group?” I asked the boys and they said, “No, in conjunction with another group? We’re not very happy,” and I said, “I’m not either.” So I told Biôlek this on the phone, and he said, “Can you come to a meeting at Bavaria Studios?” I had a weekend off and I went to this meeting and we agreed then that we would do our first Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus.
The boys then came across the next time and we all went around in a bus, looking for locations and giving them—and me—a feeling of what it was like there, and then off we went home and they wrote. We didn’t like dubbing, so they all decided to learn German themselves, and do the whole first show in German. So every night when they were filming we’d sit with Alfred Biôlek and parrot-wise learn the German for the English sketches they’d written, and we did it and were all quite happy with it. It sounded like Englishmen speaking German, but why not?
JONES: We sort of gaily said, “Oh, we’ll learn it phonetically.” It was only when we were doing the first shot when the full impact of what we were trying to do suddenly hit us, when Mike was having to be an Australian talking about the hinterbacken das ein kangaroo—me rectum of a kangaroo—and realizing you had to talk Parrot German with an Australian accent! We suddenly realized we had bitten off more than we could chew, that we were in for it.
We had no idea, either; we kept asking our translator, “Was that all right? Is it funny, can you understand this?” I think only a certain amount was understandable!
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nbsp; MACNAUGHTON: And then they asked us to do the second one in 1972. They said, “Would you please do it in English?” And I asked, “Is it because the German was so bad?” And they said, “No, but we couldn’t sell it!” They only sold it to a couple of countries—England, and I think one other. So we did the next one in English and they sold it all over the place.
Did the producers place any restrictions on the material, or request that the content be specifically geared toward a German audience?
JONES: Not really. I think we just did the same things that we do anyway. We were doing a little bit of German content, like the “Bavarian Restaurant” sketch—that was because we were shooting it in Bavaria—and things about Albrecht Dürer.
MACNAUGHTON: They read all the stuff that the boys had put together and there was no objection. Biôlek was a great fan, and so the nonsensical things (such as the production of “The Merchant of Venice” by the Cows of the Bad Tolz Dairy Herd), you know, a normal producer reading that sketch would have gone nuts! Biôlek knew the kind of thing we were doing, and he said, “Go ahead,” which I thought was splendid, actually.
The “Bavarian Restaurant” sketch from Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus.
People here now say that it was much too soon for Germany. I don’t know whether it was or not; it had the sort of response that we had at the very beginning in London. It was cultish, if you like; there was a certain group who loved it. But it’s interesting that someone in England is now putting out a video of these two German productions, because they talk about them as the “Lost Pythons.” Well, they never were lost, quite honestly. I have them!
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