Word: chapman
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...Cleese is the elder statesman of the group, Gilliam the member who carved the most distinctive post-Python career, and Chapman the figure of poignancy - the homosexual alcoholic who was dead at 48. His demise touched all the survivors, but it didn't stanch their biting wit. In fact, now that he's dead, they make fun of Graham a lot. On the BBC2 show 30 Years of Monty Python, Cleese intones: "And I'd just like to say for the whole gang, except for the dead one of course, how pleased we are..." And in a 1998 reunion...
...place to be seen was on the stage of Cambridge's Footlights Club. When Cleese and Chapman entered the Footlights around 1960, it had a glittering comic cachet. That was due largely to Peter Cook, who was a god to the younger members, his monologues passed down by oral tradition in the pre-tape era. David Frost, a Footlights secretary, would soon launch himself as a TV comedy mogul with That Was the Week That Was and The Frost Report, for which he drew on Oxbridge grads, including all five British Pythons, as writers and performers. (Later Footlighters included Emma...
...Cleese and Chapman, whose senior revue was directed by Trevor Nunn, were stars from their first auditions, with John doing "a routine of trampling on hamsters" (Pythons always had an animal fetish) and Chapman, in pre-med as Miller had been, impersonating "a man with iron fingertips being pulled offstage by an enormous magnet." Chapman's gift for physical comedy blossomed in a sketch about a man who wrestles himself - a bit reprised in Monty Python at the Hollywood Bowl...
...still just junior people coming around," Idle says in the book. "But of course at this age it's good to be four years younger than John." At other times, Python writing sessions sometimes deteriorated into skirmishes between the C's (Cambridge alums Cleese, Chapman and Idle) and the O's (Oxonians Jones and Palin and Occidental College graduate Gilliam). It wasn't so much a clash of school ties as a debate of which was the more important element in their comedy: the verbal or the visual. It was also, Gilliam would have you believe, a tussle between...
...Idle followed Cleese and Chapman to Cambridge, where he didn't cram for his exam a lot. He spent most of his time at the Footlights Club. "And one night I did a sketch John had written before, a thing called ?BBC BC' in which Bill Oddie read the news: ?Good evening, here beginneth the news. It has come to pass that...' And I did the weather forecast: ?Over the whole of Egypt, plague followed by floods, followed by frogs, and then death of all the firstborn - sorry about that Egypt.'" (Spamalot echoes this in the historian's opening narration...