Thursday, July 30, 2020

Monty Python and the Life of G


As we’ve all discovered, living in the middle of a pandemic does many strange things to your sanity, chief among them being going out of your tiny little mind with boredom, the other being running screaming for something comforting and reassuring.

Which brings me to Monty Python.

I recently discovered the entire four seasons of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Life of Brian, as well as the documentary Almost the Truth were all available on Netflix, so I’ve been both entertaining and soothing my brain with hours of nostalgic comedy ever since.

I can’t remember about three things from my childhood: Lord of the Rings, Star Wars … and Monty Python. And Thomas the Tank Engine. Four things. Oh, and G-Force. Can’t forget G-Force, man I loved that show. Five things … look, I’ll start again.

I couldn’t tell you when I first watched the Pythons, though it was maybe somewhere around the ages of eight to ten, thanks to my British-born parents' love of the series. My parents, like Michael Palin and Terry Jones, went to Oxford, so they were THE target audience for the Python’s brand of Oxbridge humor.

We had all the episodes on Betamax, being the cutting edge of video technology at the time and far superior to silly and inevitably destined-for-the-dustbin-of-history VHS, and a shelf full of books including the Big Red Book (with its blue cover), Dr. Fegg’s Nasty Book, the Brand New Monty Python Book, the scripts for both Life of Brian and the Holy Grail. All the vinyl records, too. From about the ages of 8 to 18 then Python was a constant companion, which was nice to have for a kid who went to six different schools in the eight years of elementary school. (Incidentally, I discovered that one of those schools—Sir Frank Markham Comprehensive in bracing, exciting Milton Keynes—has since been demolished, to which I say: good riddance)

In high school, I used to listen to Python tapes over and over again with a group of friends at parties. It was a godsend for an otherwise cripplingly shy, awkward, timid, dull and awful child-slash-teenager. With a single quote, you could make the room laugh! As the only British one, they’d ask me to do the voices. I still recall the look of stunned horror on the face of the uninitiated when they asked me to do “Ms. Nigger-baiter’s just exploded!”

So, this has been my own kind of 30-year reunion with the group.

Side note: Apparently nostalgia running in 30-year cycles is an identified popculture phenomenon, as people who consumed entertainment as kids become culture creators as adults, but let me just quickly reassure you that I remain as unproductive and unoriginal as ever.

Half a century after it was first broadcast, a lot of it has aged rather well. Monty Python is superficially silly, silliness without any point beyond its own silliness, but that’s ensured it hasn’t aged the way a lot of satire has.

On the other hand, a lot of it doesn’t hold up now precisely because I spent those first 10 years memorizing every routine. The Parrot sketch, the Argument Clinic. I do expect the Spanish Inquisition, I do. Their appearance was precisely the thing I was anticipating, really. Some of the sketches go on for too long or take too long to set up, and you start to recognize the set-pieces or concepts they re-use over and over: Sports but silly, man who speaks oddly, man getting angry at shopkeeper, and so on.

It’s the stuff you don’t remember anymore that delights. There’s a skit with John Cleese and Graham Chapman as pepperpots talking about a penguin on top of their television, and you can see them both fighting desperately to keep a straight face. It’s such a human moment.

The two movies hold up better, I think because the jokes are of a more consistent and higher quality. I know everyone says you’re supposed to think Life of Brian is the better film because it’s more coherent, with a single strong storyline, and the jokes are more biting and satirical, but honestly, I find that for all the jokes it’s a rather depressing movie. The bare-bones outline is this: Young man in crushingly pathetic existence gets recruited by political extremists, captured during a terrorist attack and then crucified. That’s just dark, man, no matter how spot-on the Judean People’s Front and what-have-the-Romans-done-for-us bits are.

The incongruousness of the final jaunty number, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”, is of course precisely the point of it but it’s also kind of frustrating to me—you’ve just spent 90 minutes showing me how crap life is, how the hell am I supposed to look on the bright side now?!

Whereas Holy Grail is yes, less a movie and more a series of sketches loosely strung together with a common theme and characters, it’s true, but it’s also a far more straightforwardly silly affair. I don’t really want to think about what’s wrong with fanaticism and blind belief at the moment. I just want to laugh. There’s that kind of youthful innocence to the Holy Grail, it’s a movie that doesn’t really want to teach you any Deep Message or Truth about the world, it just wants to have a giggle. And the jokes, especially in the first half, are some of the best the Pythons ever wrote—“Strange women lying in ponds” still gets a smile.

It’s also, I think, a more visually interesting movie than Life of Brian, possibly thanks to Terry Gilliam being the co-director. Apparently, the rest of the Pythons got so irritated with his focus on the look of the thing over getting the jokes that they got Jones to direct their other two movies on his own, which is a bit of a pity, I think. Just the mise-en-scène, pardon my outrrrageous accent, you know, the camera angles and the shot composition and the delightful grottiness of medieval England make it the more interesting movie to watch.

The ending is, of course, complete crap, with the whole thing just suddenly coming to an abrupt


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