November 10, 2016 • 52 mins
Things get awesome when Josh and Chuck do a live show on Monty Python at the LA Podcast Festival. Hang out as the duo dives into the "Beatles of Comedy," what made them tick, what made them so funny, the whole bit. Plus, Kevin Pollak crashes the stage.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know Roundhouse stuff Works dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles W. Chuff Bryant and Jerry's not here, but we
are here, live and beautiful Los Angeles, California for the
(00:22):
Los Angeles Podcast Festivals. Very nice. This crowd is massive.
(00:43):
Sounds massive. Yeah, you were asking for it too. I
find that when you turn and point at microphone and
just drive some crazy, they make noise. It's good old trick.
Walter Cronkite thought us that it's first person I could
think of, the first guy with the microphone that came
(01:04):
to mine. So how do you feel, a man? You're
feeling good. I'm good and a little sleepy. Uh, but
I'm not supposed to be honest. I'm supposed to. I
feel great in charge, right, I'm a little sleepy. So
if I'm not funny, that's why we've got the We
we have a thing, took and I have a thing
literally now because we've encountered so many of them, of
(01:26):
these kind of table cloths that are like pantyhose and
to get anywhere in the microphone, right, yeah, but made
of like nylons, right, so you have to be like
right up on it and it has this weird kind
of give, but putting kind of feels a little like sexy.
So if we're like sitting here during the show, it's weird.
(01:49):
It's it's this thing. I'm all over the place emotionally
right now, they're in a tailspin. You're ready, yeah, I'm ready.
So um, we're talking today about Monty Python, right, and
if you'll you'll go back with us. We're gonna head
back to swing in London in nineteen where a group
of English boys got together and started a little television
(02:13):
show called How to Irritate People? And it was actually
a television special and it was hosted by a guy
named John Cleese, Yeah, written by a guy named John
Cleese and a dude named Graham Chapman and um also
starring a guy named Michael Palin. And those were the
only three members of what would become Monty Python today.
(02:33):
Spoil it already, but it was written by Clice and
Chapman and the sort of the goal here was to
do a special and to get Americans primed for this
thing called British humor and sell it to American audiences,
but um, it's sort of failed in that respect. It
didn't generate a lot of interest among American Uh, I
(02:53):
guess TV executives. Sure, yeah, well it was it was
funny ish, you know. Um, it just wasn't It wasn't
quite Monty Python. But you could see the seeds in it, right.
It was starting to grow from this and about a
year later, Um, the BBC went to John Cleese and said, hey,
we like what you did with How to Irritate People?
Do you want your own show? And cliceaid, sure, I'd
(03:15):
love to have a show, but I don't want to
be the star. I want to be part of an ensemble.
And the BBC said, go put your team together. So uh,
he spoken to his wristwatch and said Python assemble. And
they all came from different corners of the earth and
came together and formed a giant robot with a sword,
(03:37):
the first time Monty Python ever came together. That would
be amazing. So he said, all right, I have this friend,
Graham Chapman. We went to Cambridge together. He's my writing partner.
He's definitely in and we just worked with this guy
Michael Palin. He's really funny. So he should be in.
But he was doing a show called Uh, Do Not
Adjust Your Set. It was a kid show and uh
(03:57):
Clice was a fan of that and he said, well,
that's wonderful. We would love you to come on. He says, well,
I had these other guys on the show I really
like working with. So if you want me, you have
to take this Welshman named Terry Jones, and uh, this
other guy named Eric Idle, and this other weird looking
American that's this weird looking, weird, weird all around period
(04:18):
named Terry Gilliam. And Clice was game. He said, fine,
let's just get all of us together. And then there
were six so they came together and Terry Gilliam was
definitely the odd man out here was from Minnesota. Um.
The other five had gone to what's called um Oxbridge,
right Oxford and Cambridge, Yeah, um, where they kind of
(04:41):
have like a lockdown on TV writing in the UK.
So if you went to Cambridge where you went to Oxford,
and you want to get into TV writing, especially TV
comedy writing, um, that's a pretty good place to start out. Yeah.
Like here in America, it's Rutgers right right, yeah, yeah,
or San Jose State I can't ever always get those
(05:03):
two confused. Um. No, of course it's Harvard, everyone knows that. Um.
But yeah, over there it's Cambridge and Oxford. And it
turns out if you go to one of those schools,
you're probably a pretty smart, clever person, which is a
good start if you want to be the world's greatest
comedy troup of all time. In Chuck's opinion, is that
all right? Say that? I think you can share your
(05:24):
opinion on this one. We probably won't get any angry
listening mail on that. How could you say that you
should help homeless people? How dare you say that? But
I do agree, Monty Python is pretty great. You should
probably explain that. Yes, we did it. Well. We did
an episode on homelessness, and we released it around Thanksgiving
or Christmas to really kind of like sticking in people's heart, right. Yeah,
(05:48):
our position was that you should help homeless people. Yeah,
I mean we took a stance on that. Yeah, and
we got probably more angry listener mail than we've gotten
for any other episode we've ever released, pretty much about
like parting like homeless people can all go to hell?
You know, you know you shouldn't be telling people they
should give them money or all sorts of stuff. They
made decisions. It led to that, right, I think out
(06:10):
what's coming to so, but but everyone agrees Monty Python
is great. That was the overall point. So they were
divided up into sort of naturally divided into writing teams
with them. They already had cles and Chapman who had
known each other, and Michael Palin and Terry Jones worked together.
(06:31):
Eric Idyl was the lone wolf. He wrote by himself,
and Terry Gilliam was has always been in his own
world doing his animation, so he was sort of in
his own space as well. So they were getting primed
and ready in the BBC said all right, we'll give
you a run of thirteen half hour episodes and um
and by the way, I've spent the past two weeks
(06:52):
non stop watching Flying Circuits. It's been amazing. It's like
when your job is to sit around and watch Monty
Python and then come and talk about it live, you're
you're doing pretty well in life. So very lucky guy.
And UM. So they had to come up with a name,
and um Flying Circus was kind of always part of it,
and the BBC, as legend goes, supposedly even said, guys,
(07:15):
we've already printed, except they said it with a cool accent.
Um we printed flying circus already, So you can't change
that part. But you need to, you know, if you
have a front to that didn't think of it quick
and uh, I think Clice said what about a python,
like something kind of slimy and weird. So they said python.
And then apparently Monty Monty is just like sort of
(07:38):
an English like guy in the pub would be Monty
just sort of a tired English thing like like Todd
here in America. So Monty Python was born. They liked
the ring of it. It literally means nothing. There's no
significance other than they just thought it sounded cool. Yeah,
and they had other other ideas besides um, Monty Python's
flying circus. First two they had a horse, a spoon
(07:59):
in a bass in It's pretty funny owl stretching time.
I love that, the toad elevating moment, bum wackets, buzzard, stubble,
and boot. I think I think Monty Python's Flying Circus
is the best of the bunch. Well, and then they
had a couple of things before Flying Circus, even eat
(08:21):
L Moist's flying circus, right, and Will Will Stranglers flying Circus,
which that's pretty good too. Yeah, but that sounds too legit,
like everyone would be like, who's Will strangling? It Will Strangling, right,
But then you know, once you know it is Monty Python,
you can't imagine anything else, right. It's like a partial
was called I don't know the explainer raters. It's actually
(08:47):
not bad. Drop that down. Uh sorry, I got lost
with the explain writers. I went to a place. So
you're like, so, if you ever want to get confused,
research British television because they don't call season seasons, they
call him series. Right. So Monty Python had their first
(09:10):
series and then the next year they had their second series,
and I'm like, what is this person talking about? And
then I finally looked it up after like a couple
of days. Did you really not know that until recently? Okay? Yeah,
And I'm like I knew from anew from context what
they were talking about, but it was kind of confusing
because by the time they get to the fourth series
actually changed the name to just That's what got me sure?
(09:32):
So they so they had they actually had four seasons,
and the first season it was pretty much what you
would expect, right, this is really really brand new, cutting
edge stuff. And they actually we're not the first to
really kind of experiment with sketch comedy. There was another show,
um called Q five that was done by a guy
named Spike Milligan who's like this legendary radio surreal comedic genius, right,
(09:58):
and um, they they follow on the footsteps of of
Q five, which had started just a few years before
Flying Circus. But these guys like took it to a
whole other level and the BBC had no idea what
they had on their hands, so they would shuffle it
around late at night. Some some weeks they would just
like not show it at all. Some entire regions of
the UK didn't receive it. Um, it was just treated
(10:20):
pretty pretty poorly. Yeah, and the deal with Q five.
You can go watch some of this on YouTube. It's
really good. And actually the Pythons were kind of upset
because when they saw Q five they're like, well, man,
it's it's being done. Like that's what we wanted to do.
We wanted to take comedy and give people something unexpected
and turn it on its ear and subvert it and
basically be weird and so I went and looked up
(10:42):
a little bit of Q five and the one skit
that I saw was literally like fifteen seconds long, but
it gives you a really good idea of what Spike
Milligan was doing. And it just opens on a shot
of a man with a a Mona Lisa paint by numbers,
so half of it is finished, half of it has
the big areas with the little numbers in there, and
(11:02):
I think, well, that's that's funny, that's the joke. And
so you know, the guy goes to paint and he
puts on the canvas. He paints another white section and
writes a number. I was like, it got me. I
was like, man, I didn't see it coming. So that's
what Spike Milligan was doing. And that's what Python was
kind of shooting for, was just to do something that
(11:23):
people hadn't seen. Yeah, So even though they were not
being treated well, there wasn't a lot of marketing or
pr or whatever behind it. Um it's still kind of
developed a bit of a cult following, like word of
mouth following UM among I would guess people taking acid
in the sixties in London, you know, yeah, it was
nineteen sixty nine, it was in color, which was kind
(11:45):
of a different thing. That a deal. Yeah, especially when
you think about Terry Gilliams animations. You know, like to
see that in black and white, it's still be great,
but to see it in color late at night on
acid must have been something else. Sure. Uh so if
he watched Flying Circus, I mean, did anyone ever watch
these episodes at all? They're all on YouTube. I encourage you,
(12:07):
Like they have all fifty I think episodes on YouTube. Uh,
and it's it's really amazing, Like when you when you
watch it, you see the seeds of everything from like
Mr Show, uh too, Tenacious D, Two Kids in the Hall, Uh,
Like Children's Hospital would not be a TV show if
it wasn't for Monty Python and Flying Circus, like this
(12:28):
sort of absurdist silliness. Uh. Sometimes they'd make a statement,
sometimes it was physical comedy, sometimes it was clever wordplay.
It was really all over the map with what they
were doing. Um and as we'll see, they really kind
of permeated pop culture, as everybody knows. But like a
lot of this stuff was just like a one off thing,
(12:50):
like the Spanish Inquisition. Everybody knows the Spanish Inquisition right now,
and Expects the Spanish Inquisition um and they were on
one episode that just took place on one episode in
season two, and yet it's like basically one of the
backbones of like comedy pop culture. And and that's a
really good point about um Monty Python, that they were
(13:13):
just packing episodes with great idea after a great idea
and like basically zero filler. And that was definitely part
of one of the reasons why they were the seeds
that grew all of these other things too. Yeah, and
one of the reasons why they're often called the Beatles
of comedy because they weren't together that long, but their
ratio of like great material to stuff and you know,
(13:34):
you watch I guess like Saturday Night Live is probably
the standard in the United States for years, and half
of those sketches each week aren't great. You know, Like,
let's be honest, that's what sketch comedy is. It's like
a risk. You're throwing it out there. Sometimes it works,
sometimes it doesn't. But when you look at Flying Circus
and like the Beatles, like their ratio of great, great
(13:55):
stuff to things that didn't quite work was just astounding.
It was amazing. Yea. So one of the other hallmarks
of Monty pytheline is that they played almost every character
amongst themselves. Terry Gilliam played the fewest characters because most
of the time he was um off doing animations that
(14:15):
ended up proving like really important to to every episode
and then the show overall. Um So he usually played
the least, but he also played like the some of
the most memorable ones, usually the just the dirtiest ones,
like the character in the back. You're like, what's wrong
with that guy? That was Terry Gillian. Yeah, And he
felt very much like out of his world. He was
(14:36):
in all of the other guys. You know, he knew
he was like, you know, I'm nowhere near you, dude,
So I'll do my weird animations. And if you need
like a crazy leper in an episode, I'm your guy.
I'm the leper um. Michael Palin is probably my favorite,
but that's kind of like low hanging fruit to say
Michael Palin's your favorite Python because he was pretty much
(14:58):
everyone agrees that he was probably the best after on
the show. Yeah, he was. He was probably the most
broad and accessible comedian with like raw comedic talents and well,
who did I say last week, Graham Chapman, what's your favorite? Yeah,
I think I've changed my mind. And when you watch
enough Monty Python, and I think that's kind of the
point that you're going to get through this whole thing.
(15:19):
There's an all star like in every episode, in every sketch,
and you kind of end up changing your mind a lot.
But I'm on Eric Idol right now, big yeah, yeah,
he's people like yeah, man, he was good. Uh still
is so. Um. They're very famous for playing, like you said,
all the characters playing the women. Uh. Some of the
(15:40):
best laughs you will get watching Flying Circus or when
Terry Jones plays like the great correctly English ladies like
Brian's mom. Yeah yeah, Life of Brian. Did you finally
watch it? I did. I watched it again this morning.
I woke up at like seven thirty and watch Life
of Brian. Right, I can pay for this, Yeah, I
(16:01):
didn't have that moment. Actually ordered room service was wonderful.
So they all kind of fell into their specialties a
bit though, like Terry Jones would um, he could play
like the middle class gentleman and the great you know,
like old English bag lady type. Uh. Cleese and Chapman
were the tallest. John Cleese was six five, Graham Chapman
was six too, So they often played like authority figures
(16:23):
or barristers or policeman or you know, sort of the toughs.
They're a little more imposing. Palin could do anything he
wanted at any time. He was probably the most versatile.
And then Eric Idol he did the feminine ladies really well.
And um, salesman, he was good at salesman. Yeah, he
was for me that when it comes to like word play,
he was kind of the best. But they all had
(16:45):
their strengths. And and who was it Gilliam that said
they were like a molecule. Yeah, they fit together like
a molecule, like if you if you take anyone and
and as we'll see, actually the couple have been taken
from the group here there over time. Um, it's just
not the same. It's it just doesn't quite work. And
it's not because there was a star or a leader.
(17:07):
And that's probably one of the strengths of Monty Python
is there wasn't a star or a leader. It was
just this random assemblage of guys, including an animator like
who would have guessed, like, yes, we we've got to
have the animator to um that came together to formed
this thing that had never been seen before and really
hasn't been seen since. Yeah, so it um it ran.
(17:27):
The Flying Circus ran for four seasons only. Uh Clice
left after season three, and like we said, the fourth
season was just called Monty Python. I think it only
had about half a dozen episodes. And for Python fans,
everyone kind of says, like, yeah, that fourth season, you
take clease away. It's just not the same. But it
didn't hit in America until later thanks to syndication, and
(17:49):
in nineteen seventy four, Uh in Dallas, Texas, of all places,
on K E p A Is anyone from Dallas, No
say K E p A beat away with it? Uh,
That's where debuted in the United States, and then it
got picked up all over the country here and there.
I remember on Georgia on GPTV when I was a kid,
(18:12):
I was like, you know, ten eleven years old, and
I was exposed to British comedy by watching Binny Hill
in Flying Circus, and then later on I got into
other things like Fawlty Towers and Blackadder and all that
good stuff. But um, yeah, it was all of a sudden,
Americans caught on, and so they said, well, we should
make movies then and Americans caught on, you said, nineteen seventy, right, Yeah,
(18:33):
that was the last year that they had a TV show.
They've been trying to like crack the American market for
years and it just wasn't happening, and they've basically given
up hope. And then once it started to catch on
an American they already had a pretty good cult following
in the UK. Um. Once that American component came in,
they were like, yeah, we should, we should keep doing this.
Let's try a movie. They already had one movie under
(18:55):
their belt. Um, it was called it in Now for
something completely different, right, yeah, it was. It was a weird.
What they did was they took um literally took sketches
that they had already done in front of the live
studio audience for Flying Circus. They recreated those sketches on
a studio stage. Um, and it was a sketch movie.
It was like Kentucky Fried movie or something like that.
(19:15):
And um, you know, it didn't work so great. I
think their best movies were the ones where they actually
had a story to the thing. Um, well, we'll get
to the movies. Everyone knows what they are. Sure it
didn't do very well. No, it wasn't a huge hit.
And it was made again for America. Would be like, hey, America, Condie,
just check this out. So it was yet another reason
they'd kind of given up on America. But so America
(19:37):
comes into the full and they're like, yes, let's try
to make a movie. Yeah, And Clice had left, but
he was obviously in the movie, so he didn't leave bitterly.
He said that he was um go and read his
quote here. He said that he wanted to be a
part of the group, but he didn't want to be
married to them because that's what I felt like. I
began to lose any kind of control over my life
and I was not forceful enough and saying no. And
(19:59):
he also had a couple of things he wasn't wild
about in the show, and he felt like he wasn't
being listened to. So he ended up leaving, but was
still like friends with the guys and wanted to do
the movies for sure. Sure. He also um said that
he was the one who had to work with Graham
Chapman during um Graham Chapman's alcoholic phase. He said that, Um,
(20:19):
he was writing with Graham Chapman. Um, who I didn't
know this. He was um uh, he was gay and
he was out and this is like nineteen sixty nine,
early nineteen seventies hadn't been very long before that the
UK had chemically castrated Alan touring for being gay and
this guy is out and and for gay rights. Even
actually Graham Chapman that was part of this philosophy. He
(20:40):
was like, you know what, let's let's put it right
in their faces and see what they think about it. Yeah, exactly. Um.
So Clice is like he Graham Chapman was. He had
a huge, huge problem with alcohol. Um uh during the
time that they were making Monty pipeine and and Clice
was the one who had to work with them because
they were buds from the king Ambridge days. Um. And
(21:01):
he said that, combined with the group not listening to
him and feeling like they were, it was taking over
his life. He's like, come out. So after the third
season Clice left, but that was about the time when um,
they decided that they were going to go try to
make um the Holy Grail, that's right on the Holy Grail. Yeah.
Uh anyone ever seen that little movie. I think joke
(21:27):
for joke, like Blazing Saddles and Holy Grail are in
like an eternal race to see, like a pound for
pound with the funniest movie of all times in my opinion.
So you like Holy Grail more than Life of Brian. Yeah,
same here. I mean I love Life of Brian, but
just the sheer amount of laughs and jokes and Holy
Grail is astounding. It's astounding. So they had a tiny
(21:50):
little budget for Holy Grail. They you know, didn't have
money being thrown their way. And uh, Terry Jones and
Terry Gilliam co directed, which is a little weird, and
Terry owns later would say that I think like a
kind of annoyed Gilliam. So we ended up alternating days
like Monday, Terry Jones would direct Tuesday, Terry Gilliam would direct,
sort of a weird way to go about things as terrible,
(22:11):
terrible way, but direct the movement. Uh. And they filmed
in Scotland, and uh it was just a problematic shoot
to the weather in Scotland. If you've ever been there
is uh, it's just like it is here. It's wonderful. Um,
it was very much a hardship shooting in Scotland. Uh,
they had a bunch of problems with the budget. They
didn't have what they needed, no, but but that led
(22:32):
to some pretty awesome jokes. Yeah, go ahead. So the
idea of um King Arthur riding around on an invisible
horse while his his squire follows him clapping together coconuts,
that was because they didn't have any money for horses
for the movie, so they were forced to come up
with this awesome joke, which I mean, it's funny when
you first see it, and then it's funny when you're
(22:54):
like sitting there eating spaghetti two days later and you
like think about how nuts that would be in real life,
you know. But that came out of these budget constraints
that they had. Uh. They were also had trouble kind
of you know, raising money and I think finishing funds.
So there they had some very famous bands invest in
the movie. George Harrison had always been a champion. He
(23:17):
later would invest He actually he created a production company
to make Life of Brian but Um for Holy Grail,
led Zeppelin, Pink Fleet, Right, led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd in
Genesis all invested twenty thousand. But why is Genesis getting
a laugh? This is like Peter Gabriel, Genesis's not invisible touch. Hey, hey, hey,
(23:41):
there's nothing wrong with Phil Collins Genesis. Man, nothing wrong. Sorry,
I can have you thrown out. I'm up fine stage.
I knew you were gonna say that. I was like,
I bet I've offended Josh with that. It's it's I
think he gets a bad rap. Unfairly sure he does. Well,
they were He's not like Sammy Hagar. Well, you want
(24:04):
to know something funny, My wife Emily loves Van Hagar
more than David Lee, rothan Haleen and she's proud of it.
She's like, oh, man, put on that song right now.
There's some my world issues and like the world's not
right and uh yeah. And I was like, or we
could I hear Janet Varney laughing in the background. That's
(24:27):
laugh in the world. Uh yeah. So anyway, Van Hagar
and oh never mind starring Phil Collins. I think that's
where we left off. That's right. It was Phil Collins
who got everybody else to invest probably, so that's a
made up fact. Uh. In the movie, Michael Palin plays
(24:49):
the most roles. Uh. He twel He plays twelve different characters.
He played Sir Galahad played the soldier who argues about swallows.
Remember that great scene. He plays Dennis the Peasant. He
plays a mud villager singing camel at night, the right
head of the Three Headed Night, Uh, the King of
the Swamp Castle, a wedding guest at the Swamp Castle,
(25:10):
Brother Maynard's assistants Brother Maynard Uh. He was the main
knight who says me and he played one of the
French taunting knights. Uh. Terry Gilliam played the I'm sorry.
Graham Chapman actually played the fewest because he was King Arthur,
and as in Life of Brian, they didn't want to
overuse him as the league character, so he played King Arthur,
(25:32):
the voice of God, the Hiccup, and guard in the
middle head of the Three Headed Night. So that's Holy
(26:02):
Grail their next movie from then from this point forward,
Holy Grail is just like a hit, right everybody exactly. UM.
So they're like, okay, we'll go off and do our
own things because one of the one of the things
that characterized these guys as individuals was they always had
their own work and it didn't necessarily have anything to
(26:23):
do with comedy. Like Eric Idel. All he does is
comedic acting. But he's got his own stuff too. Um.
Michael Palin got into making travel documentaries for the BBC.
That was his thing. Um. Terry Jones opened a brewery,
Penrose Brewery and Hertfordshire, which I'm saying how it's spelled
(26:44):
so in in the UK it's it's probably like um
chatting Ham or something that's so uh. And then John
Kleete strangely formed a company that created UM training videos
for for BIS. This well, not funny ones from what
I understand either was he in those I don't know.
(27:06):
I don't know way if he was in those that
they weren't funny, even if he was trying to be,
He's like, please stop laughing. Well, I'd love to see.
This is very serious. It's about industrial safety, the emergency
exits all behind and across like. Well, he was kind
of deadpan like that. That was sort of his thing.
Whether he liked it or not, he was funny. Uh.
And of course that's much later their second I guess,
(27:29):
their third movie. Their second narrative film in nine was
the Life of Brian, which I watched this morning. Uh.
To me, Terry Jones kind of steals that movie is
Brian's mother. Every scene he is in he just walks
away with uh. And that movie came about from a
press conference from Holy Grail. People were asking like, what's
your next thing gonna be? What's your next movie? And
(27:50):
as a joke, Eric Idle said, Jesus Christ lust for
Glory and that sort of got the seeds started that
they should maybe go to biblical times since they medieval times.
So when they started writing this movie, Um Jesus actually
became a smaller and smaller and smaller figure character I
should say, in the movie Um, and it became about Brian,
(28:13):
this guy who's mistaken for the Messiah the same time.
He's born on the same day as Jesus Um. But
he's most decidedly not the Messiah. You haven't seen. It's
definitely worth seeing. It's still hilarious. Is just Holy Gray
old life of Brian in my opinion, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
he's he's Yeah, something more to be said about it.
(28:37):
So because it was about Um Jesus, even though it
wasn't at all about Jesus Um, of course it got
banned in several places by people who hadn't even seen
the movie, had no idea really what it was about.
That's what we do in America, right and Norway. Norway
and seven American states banned it. And you can probably
take a pretty good stay of it. Which American states banned.
(28:58):
It's like the South and then something ran him like Idaho,
you know, and then featuring Norway. I bet Georgia probably
sadly banned it. You imagine for sure. Uh well, anytime
you do a comedic take on Biblical times, you're gonna
you're gonna be in trouble. But if you watch the movie,
it's it's not it's no, it's not offensive. You know,
(29:18):
Like I'm not very touchy about stuff like that, but
I was watching it, and I'm like, this actually isn't
offensive at any point. Really, you're not easily offended though,
unless you talk, unless you bring up Phil Collins. That's
my button, so and I love to push it. Uh So.
(29:39):
The final film they made was called Monty Python's The
Meaning of Life. Oh wait, hold on, hold on, I'm sorry,
there's one other spectacular fact about the life of Brian.
It won the Jury Award at the Canned Film Festival
in nineteen seventy nine. I have an arrow, an asterisk
and three exclamation points pointing to that sentence. Well, meaning
(30:00):
of Life to two then or did you mix it up?
Oh no, I'm sorry. The asterisk didn't work. You needed
one more arrow. They released Monty Python's Meaning of Life,
(30:21):
which won the Jury Prize at the Can Film Believe It?
And it was by this time these were like financial
and critical successes, like everyone was on board the train
and it was another sketch movie. UM, very funny. I
like the Meaning of Life, but to me still the
other narrative films were a little better, but of course
the very classic UM, every Sperm is Sacred, which is
(30:45):
very funny because if you watch Monty Python, nothing was
sacred about anything. They would take on Hitler and cannibalism
and race and gay rights, and nothing was sacred except
every sperm. Apparently, there's this really great article UM that
a lot of this is based on. UM. It's called
The Beatles of Comedy by a guy named David Free,
(31:05):
and he points out that it's sad that the word
irreverend is overused these days, because the literal sense of
irreverend is the best way to describe Python. That they
didn't have automatic respect for anything, which is pretty good
description if you ask me so. A Meaning of Life
was the last official project that they ever did together
for a while. Uh they in nineteen Um, I guess
(31:29):
in the late eighties they got together and did a
couple of live shows. Uh they did one at the
Aspen Comedy Festival, and then a couple of years ago
finally did one. Well. They owed money for Spam a Lot,
the Great Broadway Show. They were sued by one of
the producers of Holy Grail and uh because of Spam
a Lot and we're very famously owed about eight hundred
(31:50):
thousand pounds they owed him eight. Yeah, they lost, and
um they came out and said, you know, we're gonna
get back together and do some shows for the money
so we can pay off this lawsuit. And everyone was
delighted that they were going to do these tin shows.
They were one of their first reunion appearances in Aspen.
They were being interviewed by Robert Klein, and Graham Chapman
(32:12):
wasn't there because Graham Chapman died in um one day
before the twentieth anniversary of the debut of The Flying Circus,
which is kind of cool. Um, yeah, he just couldn't
hang on for one more day and um and so, uh,
Graham's happens not there, but they actually brought his ashes
(32:32):
in an urn and he's on the table during the interview.
So for those of you listening to this in the
future at home, the ashes were kicked over. Oh yeah,
and Ted Danson thought it was really funny. Yeah. I
was like, is that Ted danceing? Totally ted dance? That
guy's good. Have you seen Fargo Season two? It's amazing
(32:56):
you get money for that or anything. You're just plugging it. Oh,
I'm just a fan. I love dancing. Uh. But that
kind of like typifies Monty Python, like nothing was sacred.
They would take their dear dear friend. Uh and well
obviously they weren't his ashes, let's get real, but they
would pretend like they kicked him over on stage for
a joke. It did. So they performed at the O
(33:20):
two Arena in England two years ago. They did those
tin shows to get out of debt, and that was
the last time they performed together. Uh. They say that's it,
They're not gonna do it again. And uh, you know,
they were together for short years on TV The Beatles
of Comedy. It's pretty amazing. So we're gonna talk a
little bit about how they worked. Um. There have been
(33:41):
a lot of interviews with sort of the inside story
with the guys, and they kind of all roundly say
it was very democratic process. Um. Palin comes out and says,
you know, Clice was a little bit of the leader.
He's a little forceful his presence, he was a large man. Uh,
he could be very convincing when he wanted something. But
he said, but in the end it was very democratic,
(34:02):
like no one really wanted to be the leader, right. Uh.
Terry Jones kind of considered himself a bit of a
leader just because he directed so much like he directed,
He co directed, um, the Holy Grail, but he totally
directed Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life. Um
So even still, I don't think he he actually saw
himself as like the leader of Monty Python. He was
(34:23):
probably just the one you could get the attention of
the other ones long enough to direct them, right. Yeah.
And they would fight and argue, like you know, get
any group of creative folks together and you're gonna argue.
But they said it was never about big things. They
would argue about like the size of the chair and
the sketch, but not like the big picture stuff, which
is pretty cool. And then everybody kind of had their
own little niche that they brought to the table, like, Um,
(34:45):
John and Graham uh were funny, but also very angry
and kind of bitter, Like you could tell that they
were like that the traditional English schoolboys who parents had
like sent them off to school at age like eight
and had seen them since, you know, kind of thing. Um.
And then uh, Terry Jones and Michael Palin were a
(35:06):
little more like surreal, little more whimsical. And then Eric
Oddo was very verbal. They said, yeah he's my guy.
Yeah he's good, so good. Uh So one of the
big factors in their success was the freedom that they
had with the BBC. Um, but it was sort of
a mixed bag. They had a lot of freedom to
do what they wanted, but it is the BBC and
(35:27):
it is on television, so they would often battle them
about words they could say with the sensors. And of
course and um, they were famously censored for using the
word masturbation. Yeah, they were in the the um what
was it masturbation? Well, josh In the UH explain in
(35:51):
the summarized Prust competition, there was a game show that
was you had to say you had to summarize of
pruce poem or prus short story in UH like sixty
seconds or less. So they had this whole game show
and so they said strangling animals, golf and masturbation or
his hobbies right, and so originally the BBC was like,
(36:11):
you can't say that. Well, they recorded it anyway, and
then the BBC went behind them and um edited it out.
So in the original version that was aired, it was
strangling animals, which they left in golf like a dead
air for a second and then a big laugh. And
they said when they went back and watched it, they
(36:32):
were like, this doesn't make any sense, Like, what's what's
so funny about golf? So UM, As far as their
aim kind of depends on who you talk to. Terry
Jones very much said that they were trying to subvert
the establishment and they were trying to make a statement
and try to make some noise. UM. Michael Palin said,
you know, I think that's kind of overrated. We were
(36:53):
just trying to be funny as we could be. So
I think it was probably you know, as always, the
truth is sort of somewhere in the middle there with
what they were trying to get accomplished. Uh. They also
said that radio was a big influence because they were
from the generation where uh they none of them, you know,
they didn't have TV until they were like twelve or
thirteen years old. So that theater of the mind that
(37:14):
you get when you would listen to the radio as
a kid. And uh, I know that not many people
in this room can probably imagine that, but now we
have podcasts that do that R Yeah, which is wonderful. No,
that really struck me that that was one of their
big creative inspirations was being raised on radio. You know,
um that that they were forced to use their imaginations
and that they managed to figure out how to translate
(37:35):
that into TV. It's pretty pretty interesting. Yeah. And I
mentioned like Tenacious T and Kids in the Hall and
the shows that would come along that would and Mr
Show especially where each show would have sort of this
weird theme that ran through it, but it was never
like a statement. I mean it would be like a
watch of episode the aten Idi Flying Circus where the
(37:56):
theme was just a pig and like in the very beginning, Uh,
Graham Chapman just sits down and you hear this, and
then they cut to a chalkboard of a bunch of
pigs drawn and they just x out another one. And
then just randomly through the episode that would be a
pig here there, or someone else would sit on a
pig and they would cut it and do another one.
(38:18):
Meant nothing at all but that in the animation, Like
then a pig would drop on, you know, Jesus's head
and there would be a fart noise in the animation.
And so they had this weird kind of theme like
that one was the Pig Show or whatever, and you
very much see that. Like Mr. Show, they sort of
had these little thematic elements that tied it together. One
other thing Mr Show did very well that, um, you
(38:39):
can kind of say Python started was like blending one
one sketch into another. Yeah, like one would not end
before the other one began. They just kind of cross paths,
and Um, that was I think pretty much they pioneered that, Yeah,
and it could be done in a lot of ways. Uh.
Sometimes they literally ran into each other, like you would
(39:02):
have a thing with medieval nights and he would walk
to the next set, which was like a modern day
living room, or it would end like I saw one
where they did a little snapshot to close the sketch
and then they would pull back from that snapshot and
it's just a picture on the wall in the next sketch.
So they just had really clever ways of sort of
tying it all together. It was very cool. They'd also
(39:23):
sometimes run the credits in the middle of the show, right,
and then I run them again at the end, like
that's where they went in the middle of the show. Yeah,
or John Clice would it would like the show would
stop as it if it had been canceled, and Clice
would come on as a as a supposed member of
the BBC to apologize for the content of the show
in the middle of the show, and then someone would
(39:44):
just come in like lasso him all stage. They go
right into the next sketch. Very cool. So they're also
uh anachronisms masters that juxtaposition. Um, you know, everyone who's
seen Holy Grail. It ends when modern day police show
up and arrest the not only the actors in the
big battle scene, but the cast and crew, and they
(40:05):
would shut the movie down. So they would throw weird
things like that in there, like the Picasso thing, Yeah,
Picasso painting a painting, riding a bicycle while he's on
the highway, the twenty nine high way, just random, or
the Spanish Inquisition being in a modern day household. Um.
And they were extremely smart, very very well educated dudes. Um.
(40:28):
But if they if they were doing a project, they
would also like do more research and just automatically know everything.
And some of their best jokes came out of that research.
Like when they were researching UM for the Holy Grail. Uh,
they they found that UM one of the common tactics
during medieval sieges was taunting the people who were trying
(40:49):
to siege the castle. Right, so that was actually done
apparently verbatim in history. Uh. The other thing they learned
in their research was that they did used to launch animals.
We actually covered this in I think Our Castle's episode
many years ago, where they would launch animals. The idea,
of course they didn't cover this in the in the movie,
(41:10):
but the idea was that they would be diseased animals,
so it actually have an effect other than just being
really weird and disconcerting to see a cow come flying
any but it would be like a cow that was
very sick and would get people sick when it exploded
all over everyone really gross and lead to a plague
in the castle, ending the siege. You know, Josh. Starting
(41:41):
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and square Space make it professional, make it beautiful. Uh.
They felt no social dread. Uh. They were just like
(42:47):
they were often described as little boys. This article from
the Atlantic said they not only weren't afraid they didn't
know they should be afraid, so they kind of had
the sweet naive quality about them, Like, what's what's wrong
with doing the sketch about Hitler in the Pope is
that we should we not do that. I don't think
it ever occurred to him that that was off limits.
There's a there's a really good example of that, um
(43:08):
in the sketch called the Undertaker Sketch, which I think
is probably the funniest sketch they made. Um let me
set it up though. Uh. John Clice is this dude
whose mother has recently died and he comes to the
funeral parlor where Graham Chapman is the undertaker, and um,
Graham Chapman kind of runs down the list of things
(43:30):
they can do to John Clice's mother, right, like, um,
they can barrier, but if she's not dead yet, she'll
be eaten up by worms and beetles and it's quite shocking. Um,
or they can they can just toss her in the
Thames or something like that, right, And then John Cleese
is he's a little shocked, but um uh, it turns
out he has his mother in a burlap sack next
(43:51):
to him, like he dragged her body to the funeral parlor. Right,
So what they're playing there is God Save the Queen,
and everyone is reverently standing around. They stopped rioting because
they started playing God Save the Queen, and any good
British er will just immediately stop whatever they're doing and
like kind of piously stand there. The reason that they
did God Save the Queen was because Monty Python all
(44:14):
the guys in it had this this deep fantasy that
one day the Queen would turn on the BBC and
accidentally watch their show. And so they really hope that
the one thing that she tuned into was the Undertaker sketch,
like the foul Is sketch that they ever came up with,
So that that's kind of a nod to that that desire. Yeah,
(44:35):
and if you if you watch that sketch and you
were uninformed, you hear people, you know, start to boo
and hits a little bit and uh, let's have something
decent that's disgusting, and you're like, oh my god, the
audience is turning on them like they've gone too far. Uh,
it was all planned, of course. The baby Oh my god, Wow,
(44:56):
look what it is. Everyone, it's Kevin Polite. Well, thank
you kelling. Wow, did that just happen? Something's in the water.
What's he doing here? I don't know. That's a really
good question. He's in the wrong place, clearly, Thank you, sir,
Thank you Kevin Pollock. I've been waiting to say that
(45:19):
for years. So the BBC hated the Undertaker sketch for
obvious reasons. They did not want it to air, but
they said, all right, we'll let you guys air it
if we can put these plants in the audience to
boo and hiss and yell would eventually come down and
riot very awkwardly at the end. So that was the compromise.
And they're like pretty awkward as long as the Queen watches, right,
(45:43):
So uh sorry, where was Kevin Pollock? Really threw me off.
When they got two movies. Um, you know, they never
were allowed to cuss on the air, and when they
got two movies they could obviously do what they wanted to,
but for the most part, they still refrained from actual
curse words. Um like, Brian has a few f bombs,
a few, but that's it right before it works that
(46:05):
they don't stand out, no, not much. But they they
found one part where, um, something did stand out to them.
They actually went back after they shot the movie and
and dubbed in um instead of the C word. I'll
let you guys figure that one out. Um they put
in klutz instead. John Klice calls um Graham Chapman of
klutz um because he screwed something up. I don't remember
(46:27):
what it was. But they went back, not because of
a sensor. They went back and um and edited at
that's a really difficult sentence, edited it out that because
they thought that it kind of detracted from the overall joke,
the larger picture. So, um, they were they were self reverential.
(46:47):
How about that. I don't know about reverential, but they
didn't curse much. Um. We got a couple of tidbits
to end here. Yeah. Well they um, you know, not
only were they influential in the world of comedy, but
they they're I mean, they're part of pop culture now,
like people say things like the Nights who say NA
and the Spanish and no one expects the Spanish inquisition.
(47:09):
It's it's worked its way into the fabric and the
lexicon of pop culture. Um. Python esque is actually a
word that's in the Oxford Dictionary now. It's official. It's
a real word spam like spam email. Uh named after
the famous sketch. I wish we had the spam sketch. Well,
you should have given me a heads. I know you
guys have seen the spam sketch right where they come
(47:30):
in and everything. Spam, spam, spam on the menu, one
of their great word place sketches. But my favorite part
of that sketch not the weird fact that there's Vikings
in there or the weird fact that it stops halfway
through and there's a history lesson from Michael Palin, but
it is when the sketch starts. Are you looking it up? Uh? They,
for no reason at all lower Uh the two main
(47:52):
I think it's it's scraam Chapman. And so they lower
them into the sea and from wires in a sitting
position into their chair for no reason whatsoever. It's just
a diner scene. And then they just are lowered in
sitting like this and then sit in there chair and
then it starts. Yeah, and then it starts. And that's
like the genius of Monty Python for no reason whatsoever. Um,
(48:15):
and Python is a it's a coding language. To you
after Monty Python. There's actually a fossil snake, a fossil
river snake that lived a hundred million years ago, um
in what is now Australia called Monty python Oides rivers sliensis.
Nice work, it's named after Monty Python. Uh. And like
(48:36):
you said, the guys all went on to do their
own thing. They were together very short time, made a huge,
huge impact. Um, what do you say. Palin did travel
docs among other things. Of course, fish called Wanda. We
all saw him love that. Uh. They still enjoy being together. Um.
I think John Cleese's wife said, you know, she loves
her husband and she's never seen him have as much
(48:57):
fun and laugh as much as when he's with the
boys lads. Yeah, it's very sweet. Uh here's a very
sad thing I should mention just yesterday. Uh don't you
think we should save this for the very end to
really bring him down. No, I'll wedge it in and
we'll try and make you laugh again. Uh. Terry Jones
just announced yesterday he is suffering from a rare form
(49:19):
of dementia and it's super sad. Um. His his mates
have known about it for a while and they've all
kept a quiet but um, it's a form of dementia
where it renders him and able to speak. So they
officially came out with the announcement just yesterday and said
Terry Jones won't be doing interviews anymore, and all the
guys are making statements about that. They've known about this
(49:40):
for a while. It's been very sad to see, uh,
and now something funny, something completely different. So if you
go to a UK funeral, um, you are probably very
likely to be hit with the song always Look on
the Bright Side of Life. Actually, there was a survey
done in two thousand fourteen U of like thirty thousand
(50:02):
British funerals that found that that was the number one
song played in them and it beat out Invisible Touch.
I'd be great. It beat out um My Heart Will
Go On by Selene Dion, which is can you imagine
how offensive is that? Yeah, being at a funeral and
(50:24):
being subjected to that just be like, yeah, you would
rise from the grave and gag. And it's not I've
got nothing against Celine Dion or even that song, but
that plus a funeral is just I got something against
her in that song. I'll say it. You're you're a
music snob, I am. Uh, so we'll finish with this
(50:46):
little tidbit. Um. We might not know about Monty Python,
and it might not have never made it to the
United States, uh, if not for one Terry Jones. Because
back in the day, it was common practice in the
BBC and I guess in the United States too, to
erase over tapes of shows because they were expensive. Yeah,
they were pricey. And someone at the BBC literally called
(51:07):
Terry Jones that said they're about to erase over flying Circus,
get down here now. And Terry Jones left the phone
hanging and the guy was like, hello, hello, Yeah, did
you hear what I just said, Terry? And uh, a
little leity know, Terry Jones is already on his way there,
showed up while the guy was still on the phone,
(51:27):
shouting Terry into the phone. This is like minutes later,
Terry Jones grabs the tapes, goes and pays for his
own um blank tapes, makes copies of him, and the
legacy was secured. So we have Terry Jones to thank
for that legacy. And and this the this unnamed person
from the BBC who thought to call them rather than
(51:48):
just going ahead and in erasing the tapes. Do you
got anything else? No? Do you guys want to sit
here and watch money pipeline close for like a half
an hour? See if you can find this fan um, Seriously,
I found the spam. It's three and a half minutes long. Perfect.
Oh great, okay, you got three and a half minutes right,
all right, It will be a great way to close
(52:08):
it out. Those of you have to p t s. Okay,
we bring you to close out this stuff you should
know live episode at l a podcast fest the my
Python Spam sketch. For more on this and thousands of
(52:33):
other topics, is it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to stuff you should know Roundhouse stuff Works dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles W. Chuff Bryant and Jerry's not here, but we
are here, live and beautiful Los Angeles, California for the
(00:22):
Los Angeles Podcast Festivals. Very nice. This crowd is massive.
(00:43):
Sounds massive. Yeah, you were asking for it too. I
find that when you turn and point at microphone and
just drive some crazy, they make noise. It's good old trick.
Walter Cronkite thought us that it's first person I could
think of, the first guy with the microphone that came
(01:04):
to mine. So how do you feel, a man? You're
feeling good. I'm good and a little sleepy. Uh, but
I'm not supposed to be honest. I'm supposed to. I
feel great in charge, right, I'm a little sleepy. So
if I'm not funny, that's why we've got the We
we have a thing, took and I have a thing
literally now because we've encountered so many of them, of
(01:26):
these kind of table cloths that are like pantyhose and
to get anywhere in the microphone, right, yeah, but made
of like nylons, right, so you have to be like
right up on it and it has this weird kind
of give, but putting kind of feels a little like sexy.
So if we're like sitting here during the show, it's weird.
(01:49):
It's it's this thing. I'm all over the place emotionally
right now, they're in a tailspin. You're ready, yeah, I'm ready.
So um, we're talking today about Monty Python, right, and
if you'll you'll go back with us. We're gonna head
back to swing in London in nineteen where a group
of English boys got together and started a little television
(02:13):
show called How to Irritate People? And it was actually
a television special and it was hosted by a guy
named John Cleese, Yeah, written by a guy named John
Cleese and a dude named Graham Chapman and um also
starring a guy named Michael Palin. And those were the
only three members of what would become Monty Python today.
(02:33):
Spoil it already, but it was written by Clice and
Chapman and the sort of the goal here was to
do a special and to get Americans primed for this
thing called British humor and sell it to American audiences,
but um, it's sort of failed in that respect. It
didn't generate a lot of interest among American Uh, I
(02:53):
guess TV executives. Sure, yeah, well it was it was
funny ish, you know. Um, it just wasn't It wasn't
quite Monty Python. But you could see the seeds in it, right.
It was starting to grow from this and about a
year later, Um, the BBC went to John Cleese and said, hey,
we like what you did with How to Irritate People?
Do you want your own show? And cliceaid, sure, I'd
(03:15):
love to have a show, but I don't want to
be the star. I want to be part of an ensemble.
And the BBC said, go put your team together. So uh,
he spoken to his wristwatch and said Python assemble. And
they all came from different corners of the earth and
came together and formed a giant robot with a sword,
(03:37):
the first time Monty Python ever came together. That would
be amazing. So he said, all right, I have this friend,
Graham Chapman. We went to Cambridge together. He's my writing partner.
He's definitely in and we just worked with this guy
Michael Palin. He's really funny. So he should be in.
But he was doing a show called Uh, Do Not
Adjust Your Set. It was a kid show and uh
(03:57):
Clice was a fan of that and he said, well,
that's wonderful. We would love you to come on. He says, well,
I had these other guys on the show I really
like working with. So if you want me, you have
to take this Welshman named Terry Jones, and uh, this
other guy named Eric Idle, and this other weird looking
American that's this weird looking, weird, weird all around period
(04:18):
named Terry Gilliam. And Clice was game. He said, fine,
let's just get all of us together. And then there
were six so they came together and Terry Gilliam was
definitely the odd man out here was from Minnesota. Um.
The other five had gone to what's called um Oxbridge,
right Oxford and Cambridge, Yeah, um, where they kind of
(04:41):
have like a lockdown on TV writing in the UK.
So if you went to Cambridge where you went to Oxford,
and you want to get into TV writing, especially TV
comedy writing, um, that's a pretty good place to start out. Yeah.
Like here in America, it's Rutgers right right, yeah, yeah,
or San Jose State I can't ever always get those
(05:03):
two confused. Um. No, of course it's Harvard, everyone knows that. Um.
But yeah, over there it's Cambridge and Oxford. And it
turns out if you go to one of those schools,
you're probably a pretty smart, clever person, which is a
good start if you want to be the world's greatest
comedy troup of all time. In Chuck's opinion, is that
all right? Say that? I think you can share your
(05:24):
opinion on this one. We probably won't get any angry
listening mail on that. How could you say that you
should help homeless people? How dare you say that? But
I do agree, Monty Python is pretty great. You should
probably explain that. Yes, we did it. Well. We did
an episode on homelessness, and we released it around Thanksgiving
or Christmas to really kind of like sticking in people's heart, right. Yeah,
(05:48):
our position was that you should help homeless people. Yeah,
I mean we took a stance on that. Yeah, and
we got probably more angry listener mail than we've gotten
for any other episode we've ever released, pretty much about
like parting like homeless people can all go to hell?
You know, you know you shouldn't be telling people they
should give them money or all sorts of stuff. They
made decisions. It led to that, right, I think out
(06:10):
what's coming to so, but but everyone agrees Monty Python
is great. That was the overall point. So they were
divided up into sort of naturally divided into writing teams
with them. They already had cles and Chapman who had
known each other, and Michael Palin and Terry Jones worked together.
(06:31):
Eric Idyl was the lone wolf. He wrote by himself,
and Terry Gilliam was has always been in his own
world doing his animation, so he was sort of in
his own space as well. So they were getting primed
and ready in the BBC said all right, we'll give
you a run of thirteen half hour episodes and um
and by the way, I've spent the past two weeks
(06:52):
non stop watching Flying Circuits. It's been amazing. It's like
when your job is to sit around and watch Monty
Python and then come and talk about it live, you're
you're doing pretty well in life. So very lucky guy.
And UM. So they had to come up with a name,
and um Flying Circus was kind of always part of it,
and the BBC, as legend goes, supposedly even said, guys,
(07:15):
we've already printed, except they said it with a cool accent.
Um we printed flying circus already, So you can't change
that part. But you need to, you know, if you
have a front to that didn't think of it quick
and uh, I think Clice said what about a python,
like something kind of slimy and weird. So they said python.
And then apparently Monty Monty is just like sort of
(07:38):
an English like guy in the pub would be Monty
just sort of a tired English thing like like Todd
here in America. So Monty Python was born. They liked
the ring of it. It literally means nothing. There's no
significance other than they just thought it sounded cool. Yeah,
and they had other other ideas besides um, Monty Python's
flying circus. First two they had a horse, a spoon
(07:59):
in a bass in It's pretty funny owl stretching time.
I love that, the toad elevating moment, bum wackets, buzzard, stubble,
and boot. I think I think Monty Python's Flying Circus
is the best of the bunch. Well, and then they
had a couple of things before Flying Circus, even eat
(08:21):
L Moist's flying circus, right, and Will Will Stranglers flying Circus,
which that's pretty good too. Yeah, but that sounds too legit,
like everyone would be like, who's Will strangling? It Will Strangling, right,
But then you know, once you know it is Monty Python,
you can't imagine anything else, right. It's like a partial
was called I don't know the explainer raters. It's actually
(08:47):
not bad. Drop that down. Uh sorry, I got lost
with the explain writers. I went to a place. So
you're like, so, if you ever want to get confused,
research British television because they don't call season seasons, they
call him series. Right. So Monty Python had their first
(09:10):
series and then the next year they had their second series,
and I'm like, what is this person talking about? And
then I finally looked it up after like a couple
of days. Did you really not know that until recently? Okay? Yeah,
And I'm like I knew from anew from context what
they were talking about, but it was kind of confusing
because by the time they get to the fourth series
actually changed the name to just That's what got me sure?
(09:32):
So they so they had they actually had four seasons,
and the first season it was pretty much what you
would expect, right, this is really really brand new, cutting
edge stuff. And they actually we're not the first to
really kind of experiment with sketch comedy. There was another show,
um called Q five that was done by a guy
named Spike Milligan who's like this legendary radio surreal comedic genius, right,
(09:58):
and um, they they follow on the footsteps of of
Q five, which had started just a few years before
Flying Circus. But these guys like took it to a
whole other level and the BBC had no idea what
they had on their hands, so they would shuffle it
around late at night. Some some weeks they would just
like not show it at all. Some entire regions of
the UK didn't receive it. Um, it was just treated
(10:20):
pretty pretty poorly. Yeah, and the deal with Q five.
You can go watch some of this on YouTube. It's
really good. And actually the Pythons were kind of upset
because when they saw Q five they're like, well, man,
it's it's being done. Like that's what we wanted to do.
We wanted to take comedy and give people something unexpected
and turn it on its ear and subvert it and
basically be weird and so I went and looked up
(10:42):
a little bit of Q five and the one skit
that I saw was literally like fifteen seconds long, but
it gives you a really good idea of what Spike
Milligan was doing. And it just opens on a shot
of a man with a a Mona Lisa paint by numbers,
so half of it is finished, half of it has
the big areas with the little numbers in there, and
(11:02):
I think, well, that's that's funny, that's the joke. And
so you know, the guy goes to paint and he
puts on the canvas. He paints another white section and
writes a number. I was like, it got me. I
was like, man, I didn't see it coming. So that's
what Spike Milligan was doing. And that's what Python was
kind of shooting for, was just to do something that
(11:23):
people hadn't seen. Yeah, So even though they were not
being treated well, there wasn't a lot of marketing or
pr or whatever behind it. Um it's still kind of
developed a bit of a cult following, like word of
mouth following UM among I would guess people taking acid
in the sixties in London, you know, yeah, it was
nineteen sixty nine, it was in color, which was kind
(11:45):
of a different thing. That a deal. Yeah, especially when
you think about Terry Gilliams animations. You know, like to
see that in black and white, it's still be great,
but to see it in color late at night on
acid must have been something else. Sure. Uh so if
he watched Flying Circus, I mean, did anyone ever watch
these episodes at all? They're all on YouTube. I encourage you,
(12:07):
Like they have all fifty I think episodes on YouTube. Uh,
and it's it's really amazing, Like when you when you
watch it, you see the seeds of everything from like
Mr Show, uh too, Tenacious D, Two Kids in the Hall, Uh,
Like Children's Hospital would not be a TV show if
it wasn't for Monty Python and Flying Circus, like this
(12:28):
sort of absurdist silliness. Uh. Sometimes they'd make a statement,
sometimes it was physical comedy, sometimes it was clever wordplay.
It was really all over the map with what they
were doing. Um and as we'll see, they really kind
of permeated pop culture, as everybody knows. But like a
lot of this stuff was just like a one off thing,
(12:50):
like the Spanish Inquisition. Everybody knows the Spanish Inquisition right now,
and Expects the Spanish Inquisition um and they were on
one episode that just took place on one episode in
season two, and yet it's like basically one of the
backbones of like comedy pop culture. And and that's a
really good point about um Monty Python, that they were
(13:13):
just packing episodes with great idea after a great idea
and like basically zero filler. And that was definitely part
of one of the reasons why they were the seeds
that grew all of these other things too. Yeah, and
one of the reasons why they're often called the Beatles
of comedy because they weren't together that long, but their
ratio of like great material to stuff and you know,
(13:34):
you watch I guess like Saturday Night Live is probably
the standard in the United States for years, and half
of those sketches each week aren't great. You know, Like,
let's be honest, that's what sketch comedy is. It's like
a risk. You're throwing it out there. Sometimes it works,
sometimes it doesn't. But when you look at Flying Circus
and like the Beatles, like their ratio of great, great
(13:55):
stuff to things that didn't quite work was just astounding.
It was amazing. Yea. So one of the other hallmarks
of Monty pytheline is that they played almost every character
amongst themselves. Terry Gilliam played the fewest characters because most
of the time he was um off doing animations that
(14:15):
ended up proving like really important to to every episode
and then the show overall. Um So he usually played
the least, but he also played like the some of
the most memorable ones, usually the just the dirtiest ones,
like the character in the back. You're like, what's wrong
with that guy? That was Terry Gillian. Yeah, And he
felt very much like out of his world. He was
(14:36):
in all of the other guys. You know, he knew
he was like, you know, I'm nowhere near you, dude,
So I'll do my weird animations. And if you need
like a crazy leper in an episode, I'm your guy.
I'm the leper um. Michael Palin is probably my favorite,
but that's kind of like low hanging fruit to say
Michael Palin's your favorite Python because he was pretty much
(14:58):
everyone agrees that he was probably the best after on
the show. Yeah, he was. He was probably the most
broad and accessible comedian with like raw comedic talents and well,
who did I say last week, Graham Chapman, what's your favorite? Yeah,
I think I've changed my mind. And when you watch
enough Monty Python, and I think that's kind of the
point that you're going to get through this whole thing.
(15:19):
There's an all star like in every episode, in every sketch,
and you kind of end up changing your mind a lot.
But I'm on Eric Idol right now, big yeah, yeah,
he's people like yeah, man, he was good. Uh still
is so. Um. They're very famous for playing, like you said,
all the characters playing the women. Uh. Some of the
(15:40):
best laughs you will get watching Flying Circus or when
Terry Jones plays like the great correctly English ladies like
Brian's mom. Yeah yeah, Life of Brian. Did you finally
watch it? I did. I watched it again this morning.
I woke up at like seven thirty and watch Life
of Brian. Right, I can pay for this, Yeah, I
(16:01):
didn't have that moment. Actually ordered room service was wonderful.
So they all kind of fell into their specialties a
bit though, like Terry Jones would um, he could play
like the middle class gentleman and the great you know,
like old English bag lady type. Uh. Cleese and Chapman
were the tallest. John Cleese was six five, Graham Chapman
was six too, So they often played like authority figures
(16:23):
or barristers or policeman or you know, sort of the toughs.
They're a little more imposing. Palin could do anything he
wanted at any time. He was probably the most versatile.
And then Eric Idol he did the feminine ladies really well.
And um, salesman, he was good at salesman. Yeah, he
was for me that when it comes to like word play,
he was kind of the best. But they all had
(16:45):
their strengths. And and who was it Gilliam that said
they were like a molecule. Yeah, they fit together like
a molecule, like if you if you take anyone and
and as we'll see, actually the couple have been taken
from the group here there over time. Um, it's just
not the same. It's it just doesn't quite work. And
it's not because there was a star or a leader.
(17:07):
And that's probably one of the strengths of Monty Python
is there wasn't a star or a leader. It was
just this random assemblage of guys, including an animator like
who would have guessed, like, yes, we we've got to
have the animator to um that came together to formed
this thing that had never been seen before and really
hasn't been seen since. Yeah, so it um it ran.
(17:27):
The Flying Circus ran for four seasons only. Uh Clice
left after season three, and like we said, the fourth
season was just called Monty Python. I think it only
had about half a dozen episodes. And for Python fans,
everyone kind of says, like, yeah, that fourth season, you
take clease away. It's just not the same. But it
didn't hit in America until later thanks to syndication, and
(17:49):
in nineteen seventy four, Uh in Dallas, Texas, of all places,
on K E p A Is anyone from Dallas, No
say K E p A beat away with it? Uh,
That's where debuted in the United States, and then it
got picked up all over the country here and there.
I remember on Georgia on GPTV when I was a kid,
(18:12):
I was like, you know, ten eleven years old, and
I was exposed to British comedy by watching Binny Hill
in Flying Circus, and then later on I got into
other things like Fawlty Towers and Blackadder and all that
good stuff. But um, yeah, it was all of a sudden,
Americans caught on, and so they said, well, we should
make movies then and Americans caught on, you said, nineteen seventy, right, Yeah,
(18:33):
that was the last year that they had a TV show.
They've been trying to like crack the American market for
years and it just wasn't happening, and they've basically given
up hope. And then once it started to catch on
an American they already had a pretty good cult following
in the UK. Um. Once that American component came in,
they were like, yeah, we should, we should keep doing this.
Let's try a movie. They already had one movie under
(18:55):
their belt. Um, it was called it in Now for
something completely different, right, yeah, it was. It was a weird.
What they did was they took um literally took sketches
that they had already done in front of the live
studio audience for Flying Circus. They recreated those sketches on
a studio stage. Um, and it was a sketch movie.
It was like Kentucky Fried movie or something like that.
(19:15):
And um, you know, it didn't work so great. I
think their best movies were the ones where they actually
had a story to the thing. Um, well, we'll get
to the movies. Everyone knows what they are. Sure it
didn't do very well. No, it wasn't a huge hit.
And it was made again for America. Would be like, hey, America, Condie,
just check this out. So it was yet another reason
they'd kind of given up on America. But so America
(19:37):
comes into the full and they're like, yes, let's try
to make a movie. Yeah, And Clice had left, but
he was obviously in the movie, so he didn't leave bitterly.
He said that he was um go and read his
quote here. He said that he wanted to be a
part of the group, but he didn't want to be
married to them because that's what I felt like. I
began to lose any kind of control over my life
and I was not forceful enough and saying no. And
(19:59):
he also had a couple of things he wasn't wild
about in the show, and he felt like he wasn't
being listened to. So he ended up leaving, but was
still like friends with the guys and wanted to do
the movies for sure. Sure. He also um said that
he was the one who had to work with Graham
Chapman during um Graham Chapman's alcoholic phase. He said that, Um,
(20:19):
he was writing with Graham Chapman. Um, who I didn't
know this. He was um uh, he was gay and
he was out and this is like nineteen sixty nine,
early nineteen seventies hadn't been very long before that the
UK had chemically castrated Alan touring for being gay and
this guy is out and and for gay rights. Even
actually Graham Chapman that was part of this philosophy. He
(20:40):
was like, you know what, let's let's put it right
in their faces and see what they think about it. Yeah, exactly. Um.
So Clice is like he Graham Chapman was. He had
a huge, huge problem with alcohol. Um uh during the
time that they were making Monty pipeine and and Clice
was the one who had to work with them because
they were buds from the king Ambridge days. Um. And
(21:01):
he said that, combined with the group not listening to
him and feeling like they were, it was taking over
his life. He's like, come out. So after the third
season Clice left, but that was about the time when um,
they decided that they were going to go try to
make um the Holy Grail, that's right on the Holy Grail. Yeah.
Uh anyone ever seen that little movie. I think joke
(21:27):
for joke, like Blazing Saddles and Holy Grail are in
like an eternal race to see, like a pound for
pound with the funniest movie of all times in my opinion.
So you like Holy Grail more than Life of Brian. Yeah,
same here. I mean I love Life of Brian, but
just the sheer amount of laughs and jokes and Holy
Grail is astounding. It's astounding. So they had a tiny
(21:50):
little budget for Holy Grail. They you know, didn't have
money being thrown their way. And uh, Terry Jones and
Terry Gilliam co directed, which is a little weird, and
Terry owns later would say that I think like a
kind of annoyed Gilliam. So we ended up alternating days
like Monday, Terry Jones would direct Tuesday, Terry Gilliam would direct,
sort of a weird way to go about things as terrible,
(22:11):
terrible way, but direct the movement. Uh. And they filmed
in Scotland, and uh it was just a problematic shoot
to the weather in Scotland. If you've ever been there
is uh, it's just like it is here. It's wonderful. Um,
it was very much a hardship shooting in Scotland. Uh,
they had a bunch of problems with the budget. They
didn't have what they needed, no, but but that led
(22:32):
to some pretty awesome jokes. Yeah, go ahead. So the
idea of um King Arthur riding around on an invisible
horse while his his squire follows him clapping together coconuts,
that was because they didn't have any money for horses
for the movie, so they were forced to come up
with this awesome joke, which I mean, it's funny when
you first see it, and then it's funny when you're
(22:54):
like sitting there eating spaghetti two days later and you
like think about how nuts that would be in real life,
you know. But that came out of these budget constraints
that they had. Uh. They were also had trouble kind
of you know, raising money and I think finishing funds.
So there they had some very famous bands invest in
the movie. George Harrison had always been a champion. He
(23:17):
later would invest He actually he created a production company
to make Life of Brian but Um for Holy Grail,
led Zeppelin, Pink Fleet, Right, led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd in
Genesis all invested twenty thousand. But why is Genesis getting
a laugh? This is like Peter Gabriel, Genesis's not invisible touch. Hey, hey, hey,
(23:41):
there's nothing wrong with Phil Collins Genesis. Man, nothing wrong. Sorry,
I can have you thrown out. I'm up fine stage.
I knew you were gonna say that. I was like,
I bet I've offended Josh with that. It's it's I
think he gets a bad rap. Unfairly sure he does. Well,
they were He's not like Sammy Hagar. Well, you want
(24:04):
to know something funny, My wife Emily loves Van Hagar
more than David Lee, rothan Haleen and she's proud of it.
She's like, oh, man, put on that song right now.
There's some my world issues and like the world's not
right and uh yeah. And I was like, or we
could I hear Janet Varney laughing in the background. That's
(24:27):
laugh in the world. Uh yeah. So anyway, Van Hagar
and oh never mind starring Phil Collins. I think that's
where we left off. That's right. It was Phil Collins
who got everybody else to invest probably, so that's a
made up fact. Uh. In the movie, Michael Palin plays
(24:49):
the most roles. Uh. He twel He plays twelve different characters.
He played Sir Galahad played the soldier who argues about swallows.
Remember that great scene. He plays Dennis the Peasant. He
plays a mud villager singing camel at night, the right
head of the Three Headed Night, Uh, the King of
the Swamp Castle, a wedding guest at the Swamp Castle,
(25:10):
Brother Maynard's assistants Brother Maynard Uh. He was the main
knight who says me and he played one of the
French taunting knights. Uh. Terry Gilliam played the I'm sorry.
Graham Chapman actually played the fewest because he was King Arthur,
and as in Life of Brian, they didn't want to
overuse him as the league character, so he played King Arthur,
(25:32):
the voice of God, the Hiccup, and guard in the
middle head of the Three Headed Night. So that's Holy
(26:02):
Grail their next movie from then from this point forward,
Holy Grail is just like a hit, right everybody exactly. UM.
So they're like, okay, we'll go off and do our
own things because one of the one of the things
that characterized these guys as individuals was they always had
their own work and it didn't necessarily have anything to
(26:23):
do with comedy. Like Eric Idel. All he does is
comedic acting. But he's got his own stuff too. Um.
Michael Palin got into making travel documentaries for the BBC.
That was his thing. Um. Terry Jones opened a brewery,
Penrose Brewery and Hertfordshire, which I'm saying how it's spelled
(26:44):
so in in the UK it's it's probably like um
chatting Ham or something that's so uh. And then John
Kleete strangely formed a company that created UM training videos
for for BIS. This well, not funny ones from what
I understand either was he in those I don't know.
(27:06):
I don't know way if he was in those that
they weren't funny, even if he was trying to be,
He's like, please stop laughing. Well, I'd love to see.
This is very serious. It's about industrial safety, the emergency
exits all behind and across like. Well, he was kind
of deadpan like that. That was sort of his thing.
Whether he liked it or not, he was funny. Uh.
And of course that's much later their second I guess,
(27:29):
their third movie. Their second narrative film in nine was
the Life of Brian, which I watched this morning. Uh.
To me, Terry Jones kind of steals that movie is
Brian's mother. Every scene he is in he just walks
away with uh. And that movie came about from a
press conference from Holy Grail. People were asking like, what's
your next thing gonna be? What's your next movie? And
(27:50):
as a joke, Eric Idle said, Jesus Christ lust for
Glory and that sort of got the seeds started that
they should maybe go to biblical times since they medieval times.
So when they started writing this movie, Um Jesus actually
became a smaller and smaller and smaller figure character I
should say, in the movie Um, and it became about Brian,
(28:13):
this guy who's mistaken for the Messiah the same time.
He's born on the same day as Jesus Um. But
he's most decidedly not the Messiah. You haven't seen. It's
definitely worth seeing. It's still hilarious. Is just Holy Gray
old life of Brian in my opinion, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
he's he's Yeah, something more to be said about it.
(28:37):
So because it was about Um Jesus, even though it
wasn't at all about Jesus Um, of course it got
banned in several places by people who hadn't even seen
the movie, had no idea really what it was about.
That's what we do in America, right and Norway. Norway
and seven American states banned it. And you can probably
take a pretty good stay of it. Which American states banned.
(28:58):
It's like the South and then something ran him like Idaho,
you know, and then featuring Norway. I bet Georgia probably
sadly banned it. You imagine for sure. Uh well, anytime
you do a comedic take on Biblical times, you're gonna
you're gonna be in trouble. But if you watch the movie,
it's it's not it's no, it's not offensive. You know,
(29:18):
Like I'm not very touchy about stuff like that, but
I was watching it, and I'm like, this actually isn't
offensive at any point. Really, you're not easily offended though,
unless you talk, unless you bring up Phil Collins. That's
my button, so and I love to push it. Uh So.
(29:39):
The final film they made was called Monty Python's The
Meaning of Life. Oh wait, hold on, hold on, I'm sorry,
there's one other spectacular fact about the life of Brian.
It won the Jury Award at the Canned Film Festival
in nineteen seventy nine. I have an arrow, an asterisk
and three exclamation points pointing to that sentence. Well, meaning
(30:00):
of Life to two then or did you mix it up?
Oh no, I'm sorry. The asterisk didn't work. You needed
one more arrow. They released Monty Python's Meaning of Life,
(30:21):
which won the Jury Prize at the Can Film Believe It?
And it was by this time these were like financial
and critical successes, like everyone was on board the train
and it was another sketch movie. UM, very funny. I
like the Meaning of Life, but to me still the
other narrative films were a little better, but of course
the very classic UM, every Sperm is Sacred, which is
(30:45):
very funny because if you watch Monty Python, nothing was
sacred about anything. They would take on Hitler and cannibalism
and race and gay rights, and nothing was sacred except
every sperm. Apparently, there's this really great article UM that
a lot of this is based on. UM. It's called
The Beatles of Comedy by a guy named David Free,
(31:05):
and he points out that it's sad that the word
irreverend is overused these days, because the literal sense of
irreverend is the best way to describe Python. That they
didn't have automatic respect for anything, which is pretty good
description if you ask me so. A Meaning of Life
was the last official project that they ever did together
for a while. Uh they in nineteen Um, I guess
(31:29):
in the late eighties they got together and did a
couple of live shows. Uh they did one at the
Aspen Comedy Festival, and then a couple of years ago
finally did one. Well. They owed money for Spam a Lot,
the Great Broadway Show. They were sued by one of
the producers of Holy Grail and uh because of Spam
a Lot and we're very famously owed about eight hundred
(31:50):
thousand pounds they owed him eight. Yeah, they lost, and
um they came out and said, you know, we're gonna
get back together and do some shows for the money
so we can pay off this lawsuit. And everyone was
delighted that they were going to do these tin shows.
They were one of their first reunion appearances in Aspen.
They were being interviewed by Robert Klein, and Graham Chapman
(32:12):
wasn't there because Graham Chapman died in um one day
before the twentieth anniversary of the debut of The Flying Circus,
which is kind of cool. Um, yeah, he just couldn't
hang on for one more day and um and so, uh,
Graham's happens not there, but they actually brought his ashes
(32:32):
in an urn and he's on the table during the interview.
So for those of you listening to this in the
future at home, the ashes were kicked over. Oh yeah,
and Ted Danson thought it was really funny. Yeah. I
was like, is that Ted danceing? Totally ted dance? That
guy's good. Have you seen Fargo Season two? It's amazing
(32:56):
you get money for that or anything. You're just plugging it. Oh,
I'm just a fan. I love dancing. Uh. But that
kind of like typifies Monty Python, like nothing was sacred.
They would take their dear dear friend. Uh and well
obviously they weren't his ashes, let's get real, but they
would pretend like they kicked him over on stage for
a joke. It did. So they performed at the O
(33:20):
two Arena in England two years ago. They did those
tin shows to get out of debt, and that was
the last time they performed together. Uh. They say that's it,
They're not gonna do it again. And uh, you know,
they were together for short years on TV The Beatles
of Comedy. It's pretty amazing. So we're gonna talk a
little bit about how they worked. Um. There have been
(33:41):
a lot of interviews with sort of the inside story
with the guys, and they kind of all roundly say
it was very democratic process. Um. Palin comes out and says,
you know, Clice was a little bit of the leader.
He's a little forceful his presence, he was a large man. Uh,
he could be very convincing when he wanted something. But
he said, but in the end it was very democratic,
(34:02):
like no one really wanted to be the leader, right. Uh.
Terry Jones kind of considered himself a bit of a
leader just because he directed so much like he directed,
He co directed, um, the Holy Grail, but he totally
directed Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life. Um
So even still, I don't think he he actually saw
himself as like the leader of Monty Python. He was
(34:23):
probably just the one you could get the attention of
the other ones long enough to direct them, right. Yeah.
And they would fight and argue, like you know, get
any group of creative folks together and you're gonna argue.
But they said it was never about big things. They
would argue about like the size of the chair and
the sketch, but not like the big picture stuff, which
is pretty cool. And then everybody kind of had their
own little niche that they brought to the table, like, Um,
(34:45):
John and Graham uh were funny, but also very angry
and kind of bitter, Like you could tell that they
were like that the traditional English schoolboys who parents had
like sent them off to school at age like eight
and had seen them since, you know, kind of thing. Um.
And then uh, Terry Jones and Michael Palin were a
(35:06):
little more like surreal, little more whimsical. And then Eric
Oddo was very verbal. They said, yeah he's my guy.
Yeah he's good, so good. Uh So one of the
big factors in their success was the freedom that they
had with the BBC. Um, but it was sort of
a mixed bag. They had a lot of freedom to
do what they wanted, but it is the BBC and
(35:27):
it is on television, so they would often battle them
about words they could say with the sensors. And of
course and um, they were famously censored for using the
word masturbation. Yeah, they were in the the um what
was it masturbation? Well, josh In the UH explain in
(35:51):
the summarized Prust competition, there was a game show that
was you had to say you had to summarize of
pruce poem or prus short story in UH like sixty
seconds or less. So they had this whole game show
and so they said strangling animals, golf and masturbation or
his hobbies right, and so originally the BBC was like,
(36:11):
you can't say that. Well, they recorded it anyway, and
then the BBC went behind them and um edited it out.
So in the original version that was aired, it was
strangling animals, which they left in golf like a dead
air for a second and then a big laugh. And
they said when they went back and watched it, they
(36:32):
were like, this doesn't make any sense, Like, what's what's
so funny about golf? So UM, As far as their
aim kind of depends on who you talk to. Terry
Jones very much said that they were trying to subvert
the establishment and they were trying to make a statement
and try to make some noise. UM. Michael Palin said,
you know, I think that's kind of overrated. We were
(36:53):
just trying to be funny as we could be. So
I think it was probably you know, as always, the
truth is sort of somewhere in the middle there with
what they were trying to get accomplished. Uh. They also
said that radio was a big influence because they were
from the generation where uh they none of them, you know,
they didn't have TV until they were like twelve or
thirteen years old. So that theater of the mind that
(37:14):
you get when you would listen to the radio as
a kid. And uh, I know that not many people
in this room can probably imagine that, but now we
have podcasts that do that R Yeah, which is wonderful. No,
that really struck me that that was one of their
big creative inspirations was being raised on radio. You know,
um that that they were forced to use their imaginations
and that they managed to figure out how to translate
(37:35):
that into TV. It's pretty pretty interesting. Yeah. And I
mentioned like Tenacious T and Kids in the Hall and
the shows that would come along that would and Mr
Show especially where each show would have sort of this
weird theme that ran through it, but it was never
like a statement. I mean it would be like a
watch of episode the aten Idi Flying Circus where the
(37:56):
theme was just a pig and like in the very beginning, Uh,
Graham Chapman just sits down and you hear this, and
then they cut to a chalkboard of a bunch of
pigs drawn and they just x out another one. And
then just randomly through the episode that would be a
pig here there, or someone else would sit on a
pig and they would cut it and do another one.
(38:18):
Meant nothing at all but that in the animation, Like
then a pig would drop on, you know, Jesus's head
and there would be a fart noise in the animation.
And so they had this weird kind of theme like
that one was the Pig Show or whatever, and you
very much see that. Like Mr. Show, they sort of
had these little thematic elements that tied it together. One
other thing Mr Show did very well that, um, you
(38:39):
can kind of say Python started was like blending one
one sketch into another. Yeah, like one would not end
before the other one began. They just kind of cross paths,
and Um, that was I think pretty much they pioneered that, Yeah,
and it could be done in a lot of ways. Uh.
Sometimes they literally ran into each other, like you would
(39:02):
have a thing with medieval nights and he would walk
to the next set, which was like a modern day
living room, or it would end like I saw one
where they did a little snapshot to close the sketch
and then they would pull back from that snapshot and
it's just a picture on the wall in the next sketch.
So they just had really clever ways of sort of
tying it all together. It was very cool. They'd also
(39:23):
sometimes run the credits in the middle of the show, right,
and then I run them again at the end, like
that's where they went in the middle of the show. Yeah,
or John Clice would it would like the show would
stop as it if it had been canceled, and Clice
would come on as a as a supposed member of
the BBC to apologize for the content of the show
in the middle of the show, and then someone would
(39:44):
just come in like lasso him all stage. They go
right into the next sketch. Very cool. So they're also
uh anachronisms masters that juxtaposition. Um, you know, everyone who's
seen Holy Grail. It ends when modern day police show
up and arrest the not only the actors in the
big battle scene, but the cast and crew, and they
(40:05):
would shut the movie down. So they would throw weird
things like that in there, like the Picasso thing, Yeah,
Picasso painting a painting, riding a bicycle while he's on
the highway, the twenty nine high way, just random, or
the Spanish Inquisition being in a modern day household. Um.
And they were extremely smart, very very well educated dudes. Um.
(40:28):
But if they if they were doing a project, they
would also like do more research and just automatically know everything.
And some of their best jokes came out of that research.
Like when they were researching UM for the Holy Grail. Uh,
they they found that UM one of the common tactics
during medieval sieges was taunting the people who were trying
(40:49):
to siege the castle. Right, so that was actually done
apparently verbatim in history. Uh. The other thing they learned
in their research was that they did used to launch animals.
We actually covered this in I think Our Castle's episode
many years ago, where they would launch animals. The idea,
of course they didn't cover this in the in the movie,
(41:10):
but the idea was that they would be diseased animals,
so it actually have an effect other than just being
really weird and disconcerting to see a cow come flying
any but it would be like a cow that was
very sick and would get people sick when it exploded
all over everyone really gross and lead to a plague
in the castle, ending the siege. You know, Josh. Starting
(41:41):
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and square Space make it professional, make it beautiful. Uh.
They felt no social dread. Uh. They were just like
(42:47):
they were often described as little boys. This article from
the Atlantic said they not only weren't afraid they didn't
know they should be afraid, so they kind of had
the sweet naive quality about them, Like, what's what's wrong
with doing the sketch about Hitler in the Pope is
that we should we not do that. I don't think
it ever occurred to him that that was off limits.
There's a there's a really good example of that, um
(43:08):
in the sketch called the Undertaker Sketch, which I think
is probably the funniest sketch they made. Um let me
set it up though. Uh. John Clice is this dude
whose mother has recently died and he comes to the
funeral parlor where Graham Chapman is the undertaker, and um,
Graham Chapman kind of runs down the list of things
(43:30):
they can do to John Clice's mother, right, like, um,
they can barrier, but if she's not dead yet, she'll
be eaten up by worms and beetles and it's quite shocking. Um,
or they can they can just toss her in the
Thames or something like that, right, And then John Cleese
is he's a little shocked, but um uh, it turns
out he has his mother in a burlap sack next
(43:51):
to him, like he dragged her body to the funeral parlor. Right,
So what they're playing there is God Save the Queen,
and everyone is reverently standing around. They stopped rioting because
they started playing God Save the Queen, and any good
British er will just immediately stop whatever they're doing and
like kind of piously stand there. The reason that they
did God Save the Queen was because Monty Python all
(44:14):
the guys in it had this this deep fantasy that
one day the Queen would turn on the BBC and
accidentally watch their show. And so they really hope that
the one thing that she tuned into was the Undertaker sketch,
like the foul Is sketch that they ever came up with,
So that that's kind of a nod to that that desire. Yeah,
(44:35):
and if you if you watch that sketch and you
were uninformed, you hear people, you know, start to boo
and hits a little bit and uh, let's have something
decent that's disgusting, and you're like, oh my god, the
audience is turning on them like they've gone too far. Uh,
it was all planned, of course. The baby Oh my god, Wow,
(44:56):
look what it is. Everyone, it's Kevin Polite. Well, thank
you kelling. Wow, did that just happen? Something's in the water.
What's he doing here? I don't know. That's a really
good question. He's in the wrong place, clearly, Thank you, sir,
Thank you Kevin Pollock. I've been waiting to say that
(45:19):
for years. So the BBC hated the Undertaker sketch for
obvious reasons. They did not want it to air, but
they said, all right, we'll let you guys air it
if we can put these plants in the audience to
boo and hiss and yell would eventually come down and
riot very awkwardly at the end. So that was the compromise.
And they're like pretty awkward as long as the Queen watches, right,
(45:43):
So uh sorry, where was Kevin Pollock? Really threw me off.
When they got two movies. Um, you know, they never
were allowed to cuss on the air, and when they
got two movies they could obviously do what they wanted to,
but for the most part, they still refrained from actual
curse words. Um like, Brian has a few f bombs,
a few, but that's it right before it works that
(46:05):
they don't stand out, no, not much. But they they
found one part where, um, something did stand out to them.
They actually went back after they shot the movie and
and dubbed in um instead of the C word. I'll
let you guys figure that one out. Um they put
in klutz instead. John Klice calls um Graham Chapman of
klutz um because he screwed something up. I don't remember
(46:27):
what it was. But they went back, not because of
a sensor. They went back and um and edited at
that's a really difficult sentence, edited it out that because
they thought that it kind of detracted from the overall joke,
the larger picture. So, um, they were they were self reverential.
(46:47):
How about that. I don't know about reverential, but they
didn't curse much. Um. We got a couple of tidbits
to end here. Yeah. Well they um, you know, not
only were they influential in the world of comedy, but
they they're I mean, they're part of pop culture now,
like people say things like the Nights who say NA
and the Spanish and no one expects the Spanish inquisition.
(47:09):
It's it's worked its way into the fabric and the
lexicon of pop culture. Um. Python esque is actually a
word that's in the Oxford Dictionary now. It's official. It's
a real word spam like spam email. Uh named after
the famous sketch. I wish we had the spam sketch. Well,
you should have given me a heads. I know you
guys have seen the spam sketch right where they come
(47:30):
in and everything. Spam, spam, spam on the menu, one
of their great word place sketches. But my favorite part
of that sketch not the weird fact that there's Vikings
in there or the weird fact that it stops halfway
through and there's a history lesson from Michael Palin, but
it is when the sketch starts. Are you looking it up? Uh? They,
for no reason at all lower Uh the two main
(47:52):
I think it's it's scraam Chapman. And so they lower
them into the sea and from wires in a sitting
position into their chair for no reason whatsoever. It's just
a diner scene. And then they just are lowered in
sitting like this and then sit in there chair and
then it starts. Yeah, and then it starts. And that's
like the genius of Monty Python for no reason whatsoever. Um,
(48:15):
and Python is a it's a coding language. To you
after Monty Python. There's actually a fossil snake, a fossil
river snake that lived a hundred million years ago, um
in what is now Australia called Monty python Oides rivers sliensis.
Nice work, it's named after Monty Python. Uh. And like
(48:36):
you said, the guys all went on to do their
own thing. They were together very short time, made a huge,
huge impact. Um, what do you say. Palin did travel
docs among other things. Of course, fish called Wanda. We
all saw him love that. Uh. They still enjoy being together. Um.
I think John Cleese's wife said, you know, she loves
her husband and she's never seen him have as much
(48:57):
fun and laugh as much as when he's with the
boys lads. Yeah, it's very sweet. Uh here's a very
sad thing I should mention just yesterday. Uh don't you
think we should save this for the very end to
really bring him down. No, I'll wedge it in and
we'll try and make you laugh again. Uh. Terry Jones
just announced yesterday he is suffering from a rare form
(49:19):
of dementia and it's super sad. Um. His his mates
have known about it for a while and they've all
kept a quiet but um, it's a form of dementia
where it renders him and able to speak. So they
officially came out with the announcement just yesterday and said
Terry Jones won't be doing interviews anymore, and all the
guys are making statements about that. They've known about this
(49:40):
for a while. It's been very sad to see, uh,
and now something funny, something completely different. So if you
go to a UK funeral, um, you are probably very
likely to be hit with the song always Look on
the Bright Side of Life. Actually, there was a survey
done in two thousand fourteen U of like thirty thousand
(50:02):
British funerals that found that that was the number one
song played in them and it beat out Invisible Touch.
I'd be great. It beat out um My Heart Will
Go On by Selene Dion, which is can you imagine
how offensive is that? Yeah, being at a funeral and
(50:24):
being subjected to that just be like, yeah, you would
rise from the grave and gag. And it's not I've
got nothing against Celine Dion or even that song, but
that plus a funeral is just I got something against
her in that song. I'll say it. You're you're a
music snob, I am. Uh, so we'll finish with this
(50:46):
little tidbit. Um. We might not know about Monty Python,
and it might not have never made it to the
United States, uh, if not for one Terry Jones. Because
back in the day, it was common practice in the
BBC and I guess in the United States too, to
erase over tapes of shows because they were expensive. Yeah,
they were pricey. And someone at the BBC literally called
(51:07):
Terry Jones that said they're about to erase over flying Circus,
get down here now. And Terry Jones left the phone
hanging and the guy was like, hello, hello, Yeah, did
you hear what I just said, Terry? And uh, a
little leity know, Terry Jones is already on his way there,
showed up while the guy was still on the phone,
(51:27):
shouting Terry into the phone. This is like minutes later,
Terry Jones grabs the tapes, goes and pays for his
own um blank tapes, makes copies of him, and the
legacy was secured. So we have Terry Jones to thank
for that legacy. And and this the this unnamed person
from the BBC who thought to call them rather than
(51:48):
just going ahead and in erasing the tapes. Do you
got anything else? No? Do you guys want to sit
here and watch money pipeline close for like a half
an hour? See if you can find this fan um, Seriously,
I found the spam. It's three and a half minutes long. Perfect.
Oh great, okay, you got three and a half minutes right,
all right, It will be a great way to close
(52:08):
it out. Those of you have to p t s. Okay,
we bring you to close out this stuff you should
know live episode at l a podcast fest the my
Python Spam sketch. For more on this and thousands of
(52:33):
other topics, is it how stuff works dot com
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Josh Clark
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