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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