Word: mp
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...Cohen, mocking the Festival's fabled history of topless starlets, paraded down the Croisette in a chartreuse G-string, but the film had its one showing off-campus.) It takes a while for the art burghers to catch up with important bumps in the comedy curve. Eight years after MP&HG, the Pythons snagged the Grand Jury Prize for the, I think we can agree, much less adventurous The Meaning of Life. (Give the French another few years, and they'll anoint Baron Cohen as le nouveau Jerry Lewis...
...George Harrison was always convinced that Python was the spirit of the Beatles kept alive," Gilliam notes in The Pythons, "because we started the year they broke up. George was convinced there was this transference of spiritual essence." (Another fan, apparently, was Elvis, who is said to have watched MP&HG at least five times.) Harrison's company, Handmade Films, produced Life of Brian and Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl, then subsidized many of the projects starring or written by members of the splintered troupe: Gilliam's Time Bandits, Palin's The Missionary and A Private Function, Cleese...
...When people say it's undergraduate humor I think they're wrong," Jones says of the Python style. "It's postgraduate humor." (Like MP&HG, which grew out of Jones' study of Chaucer.) Yet the adolescence factor can't be dismissed. Squint a little, and you could see the Pythons as British versions of the American college jocks who reached their apex of glory and achievement as young men, then went into real estate, coasting on their lingering allure. It's true, anyway, if we see the TV show and Holy Grail as an extension of the glamorous days Jones...
...want to concentrate on Idle, whose chameleonic nature and gift of easy musicality made him a natural to make a hit Broadway show out of MP&HG. I only want to look at the early lives and Idle and the others, since by the time they left their universities they somehow seemed fully formed and Python-ready...
...When the show opened, Idle was exactly twice as old as he was when MP&HG was shot back in '74. If the old saying is true - that we become what we once mocked - then the Idle of Spamalot isn't too far from the "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" pub character in the early Flying Circus days. He wants everyone in the theater to get it, get it? This is clear from the show's brief overture, with oompah tubas and tiptoeing xylophones practically poking the audience in the ribs to announce what follows will be musical comedy stopping just...