Word: pythonic
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...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...
...Once it was risky even to attend a Python event. I was at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival for the Holy Grail world premiere. As all Pythonistas recall, MP&HG begins in earnest with opening credits that keep breaking down, as the people responsible for goof-ups keep getting sacked. The last credit reads: "Directed by 40 specially trained Ecuadorian mountain llamas... and Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam." The story finally starts when they're done with the llama...
...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...
...least one of the Beatles saw the connection. "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...
...Cleese was the Python's John Lennon (a natural leader, quick and acerbic), surely Idle was Paul McCartney: the cute one with the high voice, the gregarious disposition and the burden of the audience's suspicion that he needed to be universally loved. "When you make an audience laugh they love you, they really do love you," he has said, in what seems to be a dead-serious, Sally Field fashion, "and that's one of the nicest things about being a comedian." Pre-Python, Idle contributed a Beatles parody song, "I Want to Hold Your Handle," to the radio...