Jokers You Can Sing Along With

Monty Python

The New York Sun, March 18, 2005

More than 30 years after its final, Cleese-less season limped to its cheerless end, the buzz surrounding "Spamalot" is yet another reminder that Monty Python is far from dead, deceased, shagged out, stunned, or even resting. For more than three decades, that dodgy old circus has flown on, soared even, through an astonishingly successful afterlife that has included movies, books, albums, documentaries, critical acclaim, condemnation by religious fundamentalists, spin-offs, the occasional reunion, a performance in the Hollywood Bowl, earnest academic analysis, a litigation victory over ABC, cult status on both sides of the Atlantic, and now a debut on Broadway. That's not bad for a show that premiered on the BBC at 10:55 p.m. on a Sunday night in 1969, immediately after a broadcast of theological commentary by Malcolm Muggeridge.

But this Monty Python, squire, this flying circus, what was, well, it like? Looking back now at some of the earliest episodes, it's striking to see how much Python was a creature of its time and of its place. It was often inspired, occasionally pedestrian, sometimes sublime, and all too frequently silly, very silly, but never quite so "completely different" as it so smugly liked to announce.

It was, really, a typically English show, filled with more bobbies, vicars, colonels, tweedy eccentrics and class consciousness than a Sunday night on PBS - Miss Marple with laughs, something that may help account for its remarkable success in America. Those bobbies, vicars, colonels, suburban accountants, and bowler-hatted stockbrokers who accompanied them were all archetypes of a gentle, genteel, fading country still caught in a way of life that had managed to survive the onslaught of the Third Reich and linger on into the 1960s, but would finally be buried by the unlikely combination of the Beatles, Mrs. Thatcher, and the Labour Party.

Even the contributions of Terry Gilliam, the Pythons' lone American - the weirdly gifted illustrator, cartoonist, and designer (I don't know the appropriate word to describe this polymath), who was later to make a career out of filming visually striking, but interminably dull, movies - were, like the artwork of "Sergeant Pepper's," the retro schmatta sold in Carnaby Street's Lord Kitchener's Valet and so much else of the pop culture of swinging London, steeped in nostalgia for the high summer of Britain's late Victorian and Edwardian heyday. This era was long remembered in England, fondly if not altogether accurately, as the last truly good time, a sun-speckled Arcadia lost to the dark horrors of the 20th century.

Likewise, the delirious, delightful sense of the absurd that permeated Python had deep roots in an English tradition of whimsy that stretches back to Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and beyond. Even the show's frequent descents into violence - those interludes of hacking, chopping, and blood so playfully mixed into the fun - will be nothing too new to anyone who remembers what young Alice witnessed in the course of her more disturbing adventures in Wonderland:

The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting "Off with his head!' or 'Off with her head!" about once in a minute. Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, 'and then,' thought she, 'what would become of me? They're dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is, that there's any one left alive!'

Closer to the Python era, the unsettled and unsettling nature of the postwar years meant that surreal, absurdist humor found a mass audience amongst Brits, most notably with the "Goon Show," an anarchic, and (to me) painfully unfunny, radio comedy that has the dubious distinction of being beloved by the (to everyone) painfully unfunny Prince Charles.

When former Goon Spike Milligan emerged long enough from manic depression to produce the oddball, chaotic, wildly entertaining, wildly hit-and miss "Q5" for television earlier in that annus mirabilis of 1969, the proto-Pythons were appalled. Milligan's madcap stream-of-consciousness comedy, sketches without structured beginning or formal conclusion was exactly what they had been planning to do. Milligan, it appeared, was Neil Armstrong and they were Buzz Who.

The Pythons' response was to use Terry Gilliam's animation as (to quote Eric Idle) "the link thing." It was a stroke of genius. Mr. Gilliam's artwork gave their new show a look that was distinctively its own, and, more importantly, gave it the illusion of structure. It made Monty Python accessible in a way that "Q5" never was.

We should not be surprised that the Gilliam gambit worked so well. The Pythons may have been intellectual (self-consciously so - who else would, or could, have included a nudge, nudge, aside about Charlotte Corday and Jean-Paul Marat in the middle of a television sketch?), innovative, and inspired. But they were also industry professionals, clever Oxford and Cambridge boys who had already used talent, connections, and very shrewd networking to build television careers that even before Monty Python were remarkable for their success and their precocity.

It was, perhaps, always inevitable that their television show would burn itself out so soon. For a brief, shining moment, six extraordinary, talented individuals took advantage of the extraordinary, experimental 1960s to give birth to a marvel. Then the moment passed. With the exception of the wise and wonderful "Life of Brian," a film even more relevant today, the Python movies never really recaptured the original magic. It was time to move on. Ever showbiz savvy, the Pythons finally did just that.

There have been other highlights - most notably John Cleese's terrific reworking of the sitcom (a genre the Pythons once looked down upon) in "Fawlty Towers" and Michael Palin's lovely, nostalgic return to that long Victorian summer in both "American Friends" and "The Missionary," but, for the most part, the Pythons' solo efforts have fallen far short of what the ensemble once achieved together, a fitting enough fate for a team once known as the Beatles of comedy.

But like the best of the Beatles, that old Flying Circus will continue to delight, even if it does not resonate now in quite the same way it once did. Devoted audiences will still cherish those sacred scripts, keep dead parrots alive, and gleefully sing along to songs of Spam, lumberjacks, and the bright side of life. Monty Python, meet Gilbert and Sullivan.