These were rarely the jocks, but those for whom donning an English accent and making absurdist jokes about medieval kings was the height of humor.
Before we knew the name for it, it was a meme. As former GQ editor Ashley Fetters writes in The Atlantic , kids tend to learn the format and cadence of jokes before worrying about any of the content.
And on top of their physical comedy, Monty Python excelled at goofy, nonsensical words delivered in the style of jokes. So was Ace Ventura. It was the type of humor that, then and now, made those of us who participated in it feel both unique and part of something bigger.
Michael Palin remembers that the original Monty Python run had relatively poor viewing figures, while Eric Idle chafes at the idea of Monty Python becoming lovable. So maybe — maybe — that is what John Cleese is doing. By haranguing the British public about their relative lack of affection for his early work, by maintaining the most disappointing worldview of any celebrity this side of Morrissey , by being genuinely intolerable on Twitter, perhaps John Cleese is kicking back against the notion that Monty Python is a charming and respectable institution.
Or perhaps he is just old and out of touch and terrified of a world that has long since moved on without him. Can you guess which one? May you live in interesting times? The blessing is to live in un interesting times. Where I grew up, in Weston-super-Mare, our life was very proper and middle class.
So the counterculture was very much counter to my culture. I never read Jack Kerouac or anyone like that.
I did find, though, that on the West Coast of America there were a lot of people who, like myself, do not like the materialist reductionist view of the world. Yeah, there were a lot of people that thought we were on pot when we were writing. Were you? No, and the suggestion vaguely irritated me. It requires more thought than that.
Does a different kind of person prefer Fawlty Towers to Monty Python? There are so few comedic similarities between the two. The thing about Fawlty Towers is that almost anyone can understand the comedy of it.
A child of 8 can follow everything in it. The emotion in Fawlty Towers is so much more acute, though. People get embarrassed when they watch Fawlty Towers. I was in a therapy group once with a judge; when he joined the group he had no idea who I was.
The vicarious embarrassment was too much for him. I thought that was just perfectly funny. I think as you go along with therapy, you gain insight into yourself, hopefully, and also into other people, and you begin to see that there are better ways of handling both yourself and of handling other people.
Has being in therapy for so many years affected your work? I had a very friendly argument about a year or two ago with [Terry] Gilliam, because he felt that becoming more self-aware made you less creative. I said no, it makes you more creative but less productive.
Why less productive? Because you become less driven. The neuroses and anxieties that make you driven become reduced. Why stop now? Have you ever wondered what the other Pythons might say at your funeral? Gilliam and I pretend to hate each other more than we do. So many books you read about Monty Python — including ones written by members of the group — suggest that the other guys found you controlling.
Is that characterization fair? Am I right in thinking that film directors are among the greatest control freaks on Earth? So there might be a bit of denial and projection going on.
If he experiences me as controlling, it probably just meant that I had different ideas from his. And we did used to squabble about scripts, but I cannot remember a nasty fight about who should play what part.
Were you inflexible? Perhaps to a degree. I was much more rigid in those days about what constituted good comedy. But a lot of younger people are a bit rigid about what they think is good. I was struck by a paragraph near the end of your memoir where you describe looking out from backstage at the massive crowd at one of the massive Monty Python reunion shows in , and you recalled feeling no excitement in that moment.
Does that mean you were ambivalent about the reunion? I enjoyed it a lot. I make a distinction between being excited and being happy. When Chapman and I suddenly saw the comic possibilities of an idea, the excitement was like a shot of something very special. Happiness is something else.
Would you be happy, then, performing with some version of Monty Python again? Does that make sense? Have you seen Terry Jones since he was diagnosed with dementia? I saw him at a funeral probably 18 months ago. Why is that the case? Deliberate neglect by the press. That ingrained negativity toward us is quite different from the rest of the world, who still see it as important and not just historical. Not that it bothers me — it puzzles me, because it violates the rule that if you do something successful then people will try to replicate it.
When I was in the midst of Python, and even for a while after, I used to watch other comedy very carefully to see who was coming up on the rails. I was interested in seeing if there was good competition coming along, and there never was. Were you a fan of Saturday Night Live? I liked it. They asked me to host it, but I used to be much too purist. I never wanted to do a show where you had to rehearse an hour and a half of stuff in a single week.
So I declined offers from them two or three times. I remember Michael and I were sitting at a steakhouse in New York with our wives before the show trying and failing to recall lines from the sketch. My second marriage was a mess, and I thought, Can I really go off and do a movie without resolving whether I was going to stay married or not?
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