Word: circusing
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...Their fans didn't, though. Their shows became available on VHS and DVD; The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus 16-Ton Megaset was issued to general acclaim earlier this year. CDs? They've got about a dozen of them. Some 60 Python books can be found on Alibris, the most imposing being The Pythons, a gigantic hexabiography with input from the five surviving members. (Chapman died...
...Pythons, each of whom earned a stingy ?125 per episode in the first season of Flying Circus, would have lovely annuities even without Spamalot. Last year Monty Python won the Holy Grail - a Tony for Best Musical - and 18 months after it opened on Broadway it's playing to packed houses and has spawned road companies touring North America. (Next stops: Cincinnati and St. Louis.) The show goes to Las Vegas in March and Australia a year from now. And this Saturday, Spamalot opens at the Palace Theatre in London's West End. The Pythons, who can be expected...
...Seeing the early Python work back in the 70s was a liberating experience for American comedy connoisseurs. Part of the kick was that Flying Circus wasn't made for us. Unlike the Beatles' music, it wasn't meant to sound like our stuff. Either the Pythons never thought to appeal abroad or they just didn't care; they were writing and performing for themselves. The show, with its sly mix of highbrow and no-brow humor, of university wit and pratfalling physicality, must have seemed strange enough to U.K. viewers. But for Americans there were extra layers of mystification...
...their prime - which extends from the debut of Flying Circus through Life of Brian 10 years later - the Pythons were lauded as doing for comedy in the '70s what the Beatles did for pop music in the '60s. They extended Britain's primacy of Cool through a decade that, in other respects, was pretty bleak. Not that a Silly Walk through Harrod's could lessen the likelihood of an IRA bomb, or a thought of the Parrot sketch could warm a body through a winter rendered heatless by the oil embargo. But the Pythons lightened the load. Whatever the real...
...Another thing about the Beatles and the Pythons: both could be called musical comedy acts. Just as the Fab Four made humor a crucial part of their appeal, so the Pythons frequently used songs in Flying Circus ("Eric the Half-a-Bee," "The Lumberjack Song," "Dennis Moore") and their films. Idle's blithely idiotic ditty, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," helped make Life of Brian that rare Crucifixion movie you could hum your way out of. And the Jones-Palin anthem from The Meaning of Life ("Every sperm is sacred / Every sperm is great / If a sperm...