Monty Python

• 1. Introduction

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  Monty Python was a British comedy troupe of six men, and the only thing they ever agreed the name meant was that it sounded funny. Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin formed the group in 1969. Their influence on comedy has been compared to the Beatles' influence on music. Half of them landed in the top 50 of a 2005 poll that asked more than 300 comedians, writers, producers, and directors to name the greatest comedians of all time. They built a body of work that grew from one BBC sketch show into films, live shows, albums, books, and musicals. How did a Kashmir tandoori restaurant in Hampstead, a public-domain march from 1893, and a giant cartoon foot become the building blocks of all that? And why, after decades of reunion rumours, did the surviving members keep insisting they could not even get into the same room?

• 2. Six Writers, One Restaurant

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  Oxford and Cambridge sorted the future Pythons into camps long before they met. Jones and Palin performed together at Oxford with the Oxford Revue. Chapman and Cleese met at Cambridge, where Idle also studied, starting a year after them. Cleese met Gilliam in New York City while touring with the Cambridge University Footlights revue Cambridge Circus, originally titled A Clump of Plinths. The Footlights of that era was a remarkable room. Its members included the future Goodies and Jonathan Lynn, co-writer of Yes Minister, while Idle's presidency overlapped with feminist writer Germaine Greer and broadcaster Clive James. The satirical BBC show The Frost Report, broadcast from March 1966 to December 1967, is credited as the program that first united the British Pythons. According to John Cleese's autobiography, the group's real origin lay in the admiration he and Chapman had for the new comedy on Do Not Adjust Your Set. Their official website dates the birth to a Kashmir tandoori restaurant in Hampstead on the 11th of May 1969, after a taping of that show. It was the first time all six got together, with later meetings at Cleese's apartment in Basil Street, Knightsbridge.

• 3. Killing The Punchline

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  "This is the silliest sketch I've ever been in," Cleese remarks to Idle in an early episode, and they simply walk off the set. That moment captured a deliberate decision. The Pythons admired Beyond the Fringe and the work of Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore, but noticed that strong sketches often fizzled because the writers could not find a punchline good enough to end on. So they refused to cap their sketches in the traditional manner. Spike Milligan nearly stole the idea first. While assembling material, the Pythons watched him record Q in 1969, a show more anarchic than any before it, in which he would abandon sketches halfway through muttering "Did I write this?" Palin recalls that he and Jones adored the Q shows, and Jones became determined the Pythons should innovate. They had revered Milligan since The Goon Show, which they regard as their biggest influence and which featured Peter Sellers, whom Cleese called "the greatest voice man of all time." Their fix was to end sketches by other means. Chapman's "Colonel" character marched in to stop scenes for being far too silly. A sixteen-ton weight dropped on a character, or a knight in armour played by Gilliam clubbed someone with a rubber chicken. Cleese, in a dinner suit, announced "And now for something completely different," a line that became the title of the first Python film.

• 4. The Stream Of Consciousness

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  Jones remembered a Gilliam animation called "Beware of the Elephants," made for Do Not Adjust Your Set, and saw a way to let sketches blend into one another. Palin had been equally taken with another Gilliam piece, "Christmas Cards," agreeing it was a way of doing things differently. Because Cleese, Chapman, and Idle cared less about the overall flow, Jones, Palin, and Gilliam shaped the presentation style, using animation to slide from one sketch into the next. The team worked from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon. Cleese and Chapman wrote as one pair, Jones and Palin as another, and Idle wrote alone, before all joined Gilliam to critique scripts. If the majority found an idea funny, it went in. Their schooling split their humour cleanly. Cleese put it plainly: the heavy-abuse sketches were his and Graham's, anything that opened with a slow pan across countryside and impressive music was Mike and Terry's, and anything that vanished up a personal orifice with words was Eric's. Gilliam ran the visual identity. He built his collage stop-motion from famous artworks and Victorian engravings, working with a camera, scissors, and an airbrush. The cartoon format let him stage astonishingly violent scenes without fear of censorship. The giant foot that crushes the show's title is Cupid's foot, cut from Bronzino's Renaissance painting Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time.

• 5. Naming The Circus

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  Owl Stretching Time was one of the discarded titles, alongside The Toad Elevating Moment, A Horse, a Spoon and a Basin, and Bun, Wackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot. The group liked that a title would have nothing to do with the show's content. Flying Circus stuck only because the BBC had already printed it in its schedules and would not amend it. Gwen Dibley's Flying Circus honoured a woman Palin had read about in the newspaper, on the theory that she might be amused to find she had a TV show. Baron Von Took's Flying Circus paid affectionate tribute to Barry Took, who had brought the team together, echoing Baron Manfred von Richthofen's Flying Circus of the First World War. Monty Python itself carried no real meaning. In the 1998 documentary Live at Aspen, the group implied that "Monty" was Idle's gently mocking tribute to Field Marshal Lord Montgomery, with "Python" chosen as a slippery-sounding surname. On other occasions Idle said "Monty" came from a rotund regular at his local pub, whose name people kept asking after at the bar. The theme music was the Band of the Grenadier Guards playing John Philip Sousa's "The Liberty Bell," first published in 1893. Because any work first published before 1924 was in the public domain under United States copyright law, Gilliam could use the march without paying royalties.

• 6. Crossing The Atlantic

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  The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation put the show on its national fall line-up in September 1970, then dropped it after the Christmas break. Within a week the CBC received hundreds of complaint calls, and more than 100 people staged a demonstration at its Montreal studios. The show returned and became a fixture there for the first half of the 1970s. America came slower and through public television. After a 1972 film release met limited box office success, Python's American manager Nancy Lewis worked with Ron Devillier, programming director at the nonprofit PBS station KERA in Dallas, Texas, who began airing episodes in the summer of 1974. The ratings stunned him. Devillier recalled the first night scoring a 6, a number so high they did not know what it looked like, before it climbed into the 8s, 9s, and 10s. The popularity on PBS drove a successful 1974 re-release of the earlier film. The New York Times caught the moment in a March 1975 headline: "Monty Python's Flying Circus Is Barnstorming Here." Asked what challenges remained, Chapman replied, "Well, actually world supremacy would be very nice," before Idle cautioned that such a thing had to be done properly. The American networks were less gentle. In 1975 ABC broadcast two ninety-minute specials but cut 24 minutes from each. Python sued in Gilliam v. American Broadcasting Companies and won. By 1976 the show was the top-rated program in Japan, and in 2018 the Dutch town of Spijkenisse opened a silly walks road crossing, believed to be a world first.

• 7. From Television To Cinema

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  Cleese left at the end of the third series, telling the group "I want out" on an Air Canada flight to Toronto. He felt he had little fresh to offer and found the now alcoholic Chapman difficult to work with. The rest carried on for a half season before halting the programme in 1974; the first three series ran 13 episodes each, the fourth just six. Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1975 was their first proper feature of entirely new material, based on Arthurian legend and directed by Jones and Gilliam, with Chapman as King Arthur. It was filmed in rural Scotland on a budget of only £229,000, raised partly through rock groups including Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and Led Zeppelin, plus Tony Stratton Smith of Charisma Records. Backers wanted to cut the Black Knight scene, in which the knight loses his limbs and insists "Tis but a scratch," but it stayed. Life of Brian in 1979 followed a man born in a neighbouring stable to Jesus and mistaken for the Messiah. The team agreed not to mock Jesus directly, satirising instead credulity and hypocrisy among followers. The finance came from George Harrison, who with Denis O'Brien formed HandMade Films and took a cameo. In 2006 a Channel 4 list ranked it first among the 50 Greatest Comedy Films. The Meaning of Life in 1983 returned to a string of sketches following the ages of man, with Mr. Creosote exploding after a wafer-thin mint. It won the Grand Prix at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. The film was the last project on which all six Pythons collaborated, apart from a four-second appearance in a closet in 1989.

• 8. The Reunion That Wouldn't Come

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  "As far as I'm concerned, there won't be a Beatles reunion as long as John Lennon remains dead," George Harrison once said, and Idle adapted the line, promising a proper Python reunion "just as soon as Graham Chapman comes back from the dead," before adding that they were talking to his agent about terms. Chapman died of metastatic throat cancer on the 4th of October 1989, ending serious reunion speculation. At his memorial service Cleese delivered an irreverent eulogy built from the euphemisms in the "Dead Parrot" sketch. The survivors kept circling back without fully reuniting. Idle revived his fortunes by adapting Python material, writing the Tony Award-winning musical Spamalot, which won three Tonys including Best Musical, and then the oratorio Not the Messiah. A 2013 legal defeat to producer Mark Forstater over Spamalot royalties left the group owing a combined £800,000, and they proposed a reunion show to pay the bill. Tickets for a 2014 stage show at the O2 Arena in London sold out in 43 seconds, prompting nine more dates. Mick Jagger mocked the idea in a promotional video as wrinkly old men reliving their youth, noting the best one had died years ago. Palin said the final show on the 20th of July 2014 would be the last time the troupe performed together. It was screened to 2,000 cinemas worldwide. Jones, long called the heart of the group, died on the 21st of January 2020 from complications of dementia, having delivered as Brian's mother the line voted the funniest in film history: "He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!"