Monty Python Speaks!: The Complete Oral History of Monty Python, as Told by the Founding Members and a Few of Their Many Friends and Collaborators
352
Monty Python Speaks!: The Complete Oral History of Monty Python, as Told by the Founding Members and a Few of Their Many Friends and Collaborators
352eBook
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Overview
With a Foreword by John Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of its BBC debut, a revised and updated edition of the complete oral history of Monty Python—an insightful, in-depth portrait of the brilliant and hysterically funny show that transformed modern comedy.
Broadcast by the BBC between 1969 and 1974, Monty Python’s Flying Circus introduced something completely different: a new brand of surrealistic, stream-of-consciousness comedy that pushed the traditional boundaries of format, style, and content. Blending brilliant satire with slapstick silliness, The Pythons—Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin—spoke to a generation eager to break free of the conventional. Making their way across the Atlantic and the world, the Pythons’ zany approach to comedy would have a monumental influence on modern popular culture, paving the way for farcical entertainment from Saturday Night Live to The Simpsons to Austin Powers.
In Monty Python Speaks, David Morgan has collected interviews with Monty Python’s founding members, actors, producers, and other collaborators to produce a no-holds-barred look at the Pythons’ legendary sketches and films, including Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical Spamalot), and The Meaning of Life. Featuring four new chapters that focus on the group’s oeuvre since the first edition’s publication twenty years ago, as well as a new foreword and updated resources, Monty Python Speaks offers a fascinating peek behind the scenes of the Pythons’ creative process—including the friendships and feuds—that catapulted a comedy revolution.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780062292209 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2013 |
| Sold by: | HARPERCOLLINS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Pre-Python
In the Old Days We Used to Make Our Own Fun
If there is a progenitor to credit (or blame!) for Monty Python, the innovative and surreal comedy group that turned the BBC and cinema screens on their ends, one need look no further than a tall, undisciplined, manic-depressive Irishman, born and raised in India, who spent his young adulthood playing the trumpet for British troops in North Africa, before wrestling his fervent notions of humor onto paper in the back of a London pub.
Spike Milligan, author of such pithy memoirs as Adolf Hitler -- My Part in His Downfall, created the revolutionary BBC Radio series The Goon Show, which was to radio comedy what Picasso was to postcards. Aired between 1951 and 1960, and featuring Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and (briefly) Michael Bentine, The Goon Show was a marvelously anarchic mixture of nonsensical characters, banterish wordplay and weird sound effects all pitched at high speed. The surreal plots (such as they were) might concern climbing to the summit of Mt. Everest from the inside, drinking the contents of Loch Lomond to recover a sunken treasure, or flying the Albert Memorial to the moon.
Milligan's deft use of language and sound effects to create surreal mindscapes showed how the medium of radio could be used to tell stories that did not rely on straightforward plots or punchlines; it was the illogic of the character's actions bordering on the fantastic (i.e., the hero being turned into a liquid and drunken) whichmoved the show along. It was a modern, dramatized version of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear -- fast-paced and hip, its language a bit blue around the edges.
The artistic and popular success of The Goon Show inspired many humorists who followed. Although its surreal nature could not really be matched, its fast-paced celebration of illogic and its penchant for satire opened the doors for some of the edgier comedy that came to light in Britain in the sixties, such as "Beyond the Fringe" (an internationally successful cabaret featuring Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, and Dudley Moore), and the television series That Was the Week That Was and The Frost Report.
But while The Goon Show demonstrated how broadcast comedy could bend convention, it was the passionate satire of the rising talents from university revues that forced satire -- typically a literary exercise -- into the vernacular of the day. If a map were to be drawn of the comedy universe in the late fifties and early sixties, its center would assuredly comprise the halls of Cambridge and Oxford; between them, they produced a flood of talented writers and performers who were to raise the comedy standard, extending from stage to recordings, magazines, television, and film.
Among the many illustrious figures who began their careers in Cambridge Footlights or in revues at Oxford were Humphrey Barclay, David Frost, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden, Jo Kendall, David Hatch, Jonathan Lynn, Tony Hendra, and Trevor Nunn. Also from this rich training ground came five writer/performers of deft talent: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin -- five-sixths of what would become the most successful comedy group in film and television, Monty Python.
Leading up to their first collaboration as Python in the spring of 1969, these five Cambridge/Oxford university grads were working separately or in teams for several radio and TV shows at the BBC and at independent television (ITV) companies. They soon recognized similar tastes or aesthetics about how comedy should be written and performed. It was partly magnetism and partly luck which brought the group together, and the result was a program that reinvented television comedy, launched a successful string of films, books, and recordings, and turned dead parrots and Spam into cherished comic icons.
I Mean, They Think Well, Don't They
Terry Jones: Mike and I had done a little bit of work together when we'd been at Oxford. I first saw Mike doing cabaret with Robert Hewison, who later became a theatre critic. Mike and I and Robert all worked together on a thing called "Hang Down Your Head and Die." It was in the style of Joan Littlewood's "Oh, What a Lovely War," and it was a show against capital punishment, which we still had in this country at that time. That was the first time Mike and I worked together. And then we did an Oxford revue called "Loitering Within Tent" -- it was a revue done in a tent -- and he and I worked out a sequence called the "Slapstick Sequence" [in which a professor introduces demonstrations of various laugh-inducing pratfalls]. As far as I remember that was the first real writing collaboration we did, and in fact that sketch was later done in the Python stage show.
I did a bit of writing with Miles Kington (who's now a columnist for The Independent), and then when Mike came down (I was a year ahead of Mike) he worked on a TV pop show for a while. By that time I'd got a job at the BBC, so I kind of knew what was happening, and Mike and I started writing stuff for The Frost Report. We were contributing little one-liners for Frosts monologue and sketches, and then we got to doing these little visual films which we actually got to perform in. Little things like, "What judges do at the high court during recess." We just film a lot of judges with their wigs and gowns in a children's playground, going down slides.
We weren't being paid very much for the writing; our fee in those days was seven guineas a minute -- of course, that's a minute of air time, not how long it takes to write! We were kind of lucky [if] we got two or three minutes of material on the show, so by letting us appear in our...
Monty Python Speaks. Copyright © by David Morgan. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | v | |
| Interviewees | ix | |
| Introduction | 1 | |
| Pre-Python | 5 | |
| Birth | 22 | |
| Take-Off | 36 | |
| The Pythons Through the Looking Glass | 75 | |
| The Control Freak | 77 | |
| Splunge! | 81 | |
| The Nice One | 92 | |
| The Cheeky One | 95 | |
| The Zealous Fanatic | 98 | |
| The Monosyllabic Minnesota Farm Boy | 104 | |
| The Group Dynamic | 108 | |
| And Now for Something Completely... the Same? | 118 | |
| Fear and Loathing at the BBC | 129 | |
| Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 144 | |
| The U.S. Invasion Begins | 182 | |
| The Fourth (and Final) Sortie | 196 | |
| Caught in Python's Orbit | 210 | |
| Life of Brian | 224 | |
| Flying Solo | 255 | |
| The Meaning of Life | 272 | |
| Le Morte d'Arthur | 294 | |
| The "If You Could Save Only One Thing You've Produced" Chapter | 302 | |
| 21st-Century Python | 305 | |
| The Python Oeuvre | 317 | |
| Sources | 323 | |
| Bibliography | 325 | |
| Index | 327 |
What People are Saying About This
Reading the oral history of the groundbreaking comedy troupe Monty Python, you can't help but cast the participants in Beatle-esque terms. John Cleese and Terry Jones were John and Paul, always vying for alpha-male status; Michael Palin and Graham Chapman were Ringo, sweet-natured and enjoying the ride; Eric Idle was George, whose brilliance was shadowed by the stronger personalities; and animator Terry Gilliam was George Martin, who underscored the collective's surreal humor. Monty Python Speaks reveals how these five Brits and the token Yank (Gilliam) managed to infiltrate cultures worldwide with their subversive brand of cerebral comedy and secure a unique spot in the entertainment annals. David Morgan serves as interviewer, allowing the Pythons and their friends to speak for themselves (the late Chapman is represented by his partner, David Sherlock). No final rip-off this: The boys give an articulate, candid description of how they worked together and how their fraternal competitiveness ultimately resulted in those damn clever quips that we all repeat, as if to make them our own.