Monty Python

Monty Python’s Flying Circus was one of the most influential and acclaimed comedy shows in British television history. Broadcast in four series from 1969 to 1974, it mixed absurdist humor, parody, satire, and surreal animation in a free-flowing style that largely dispensed with the standard comedy sketch format. This innovative blend of the intellectual and the silly quickly developed a cult following in Britain and then internationally. The members of Monty Python were John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Terry Jones (all Oxford or Cambridge University graduates) and the American-born animator Terry Gilliam. The success of the television series prompted books, records, stage shows, [Page 519]and five feature-length films, two of which— Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974) and Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)—are recognized comedy classics. The group formally stopped working together after the film Monty Python’s Meaning of Life (1983), but they retain a huge following and a deserved reputation for transforming modern television comedy. In the Oxford English Dictionary, Pythonesque is defined as signifying absurd, surreal humor.

Before forming as a group, different Pythons wrote material for and performed in important satirical television shows such as That Was the Week That Was (1962–1963) and The Frost Report (1966–1967). Cleese and Chapman starred in At Last the 1948 Show (1967). Idle, Palin, and Jones produced an imaginative children’s comedy show, Do Not Adjust Your Set (1967–1969), where Gilliam joined them, contributing technically simple but marvelously inventive cut-up animations that mixed arresting images with a grotesque comic sense. Cleese had been offered a comedy television series by the BBC and suggested collaboration to Palin, a move that brought the six members together. The nonsensical name Monty Python’s Flying Circus was preferred to alternatives, including Owl Stretching Time. With Gilliam’s stream-of-consciousness titles playing over John Philip Sousa’s “The Liberty Bell” march, Monty Python’s Flying Circus was first broadcast on BBC television in October 1969. The combination of satirical and surrealist comedy drew on verbal and visual influences, including the anarchic genius of Spike Milligan (the creator of the revered Goon Show, an absurdist radio program of the 1950s) and the cerebral comedy of the Beyond the Fringe group (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Bennett). The Pythons added their brand of visual and verbal silliness, pieces such as “Cheese Shop,” “Dead Parrot,” “Spanish Inquisition,” “Lumberjack Song,” and the “Ministry of Silly Walks” marking high points in British television comedy. Not everything worked, but collectively the profusion of imaginative flashes linked by Gilliam’s animation kept viewers entranced. The show parodied television conventions and formats such as game shows, interviews, news broadcasts, documentaries, and pretentious cultural programs. It ventured regularly into the absurd (“Flying Sheep”), the pseudo-intellectual (“Summarise Proust Competition”), the silly (“Spam,” in which the main item on a café menu is Spam, a brand of spiced ham served from a can), and the grotesque (a cartoon figure decapitates himself while shaving). Monty Python’s self-mocking catchphrase, “And now for something completely different,” captures its subversive approach. The strong performing talents of the group added substantially to the show’s scope and quality, with the gifted Carol Cleveland appearing regularly in straight female roles. Cleese felt that the group had started to repeat itself by the third series and did not participate in the final fourth series, usually recognized as a falling away from the early high standards.

...