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...Well, now he's had one for the 40-plus years of his Python fame. Idle remains the most boyish of the group, with a sense of humor unabashedly adolescent, both pleasing and easy to please. His love of verbal play is so intense it seems like a bright boy's first passion at discovering the worlds in words - the alternate, funhouse universes that language could create. Sometimes that ardor lasts a lifetime; it did for Joyce and Nabokov. Not that Idle is at their rarefied level, but his word-joy was from the beginning, and remains, infectious...
...PYTHON UNIVERSITY...
...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...
...John was older by a few years - a seniority crucial to lads just down from university. Cleese was the only one who had hit 30 by the time Flying Circus began, and the one who had become a familiar television personality pre-Python. He was also the first to get bored by the show. Cleese did go on the lam a lot, leaving the Pythons more times than Judy Garland sang "Over the Rainbow." He wrote little for the third season of the TV show (he claims doing only the two most famous sketches, Cheese Shop and Dennis Moore...
...youngest members, Palin and Idle. "In an odd way he always still looks on us as if we're 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...