Tonight Monty Python completed their tenth and final show at the O2 stadium in London – which means the iconic comedy troupe have performed for what is likely the very last time.
Predictably, the shows received mostly cynical eye-rolls from the English press – complaints about the lack of new material, how it was nothing but a blatant cash grab (something, in true Python tradition, they cop to unabashedly) and that they are, after all, just a bunch of old men now.
Well…except for the dead one.
But just like the thousands of diehard fans that bought out every show, I would have gladly paid the price and lined up to see my comedy heroes in one last hurrah.
It’s hard to overstate what these “old men” mean to me.
It’s harder still to overstate what they mean in the history of comedy.
When you track the influence of their work over the last four decades, starting with sketch-show offspring Saturday Night Live and SCTV and the huge amount of talent spawned there, and extending all the way to a general tone of meta adult silliness that has become the standard in humor, I would contend it is as vast and far-reaching as The Beatles had on music.
But in 1975, my introduction to Python was, to say the least, inauspicious – just a handwritten note taped where a movie poster was supposed to be.
I was on summer vacation in Los Angeles with my father and we were standing outside a twin theatre in Westwood. In one glass display case was a glossy color poster for Smile, Michael Ritchie’s black comedy about beauty pageants.
In the other glass case, was a small scrap of notebook paper where someone in a hurry had scribbled seemingly random words –
We stared blankly. The words could not have made less sense to us.
I was already a huge movie buff – the only 12 year-old in Colorado with a subscription to Weekly Variety – so my Dad asked if I had ever heard of this Monty Python guy. I shrugged and shook my head, imagining only a cartoon snake. I didn’t know what a Holy Grail was either. Or any Grail, for that matter. To be honest, the sloppy nature of the sign was almost scary, like a kind of a dare. I mean, who walks into a dark theatre for a movie that doesn’t even have a poster??
We opted for Smile, of course – which turned out to be a fairly minor 70’s satire.
But the irony was that the Pythons would have heartily approved of the movie’s best and darkest joke. A woman walks in on her mild-mannered, depressed husband as he holds a gun to his head, about to commit suicide. She yells at him to stop, that this is not the answer to his problems. He agrees and shoots her instead. I laughed out loud, instinctively, a kneejerk reaction to the shock of the moment – which was, of course, the intent of the scene. But my Dad just as instinctively hushed me. “That’s not funny”, he said. I caught myself and immediately felt guilty.
(I can’t imagine how my father would have reacted to the infamous Black Knight scene in Holy Grail where John Cleese gets his arms and legs cut off, complete with arterial spray)
Looking back now, it was like a portent of my taste for Python.
It was the first time I realized I might have a different sense of humor from my parents; that I (and my whole generation) was ready – hungry really – for something with more of an edge.
Soon after I got home, I stumbled onto the Flying Circus shows on PBS. They were hard to miss really. We only had five measly channels in those days and every time you went around the dial there was this strange badly-lit British craziness forcing you to stop and gawk.
By the time they re-released Holy Grail months later – with posters this time – I realized what I had missed in LA. I rushed out on a Saturday morning to see the first screening of the day and found myself completely alone in the theatre. Before I knew it, I was laughing out loud with total abandon. Then so hard I actually fell out of my chair. I was on my hands and knees in the aisle, convulsing soundlessly, except for the occasional hitching noise as I gasped for air. My face hurt. There were no adults or even fellow audience members necessary to tell me what was funny – I knew.
When the movie ended abruptly, the film itself seeming to break, I must have sat there for a good five minutes, glancing back at the projection booth and wondering if I should complain…before I finally realized it was just one last Python joke on the audience. I loved the bastards even more.
To this day, I think Holy Grail is their masterpiece.
Pound for pound, laugh for laugh, it may just be the funniest movie ever made.
Nowhere else have I seen intellectual wit and anarchic stupidity married to such perfection.
And it never dates – it is just as fresh and crazy today as ever.
Like many early Python adopters, it felt like a private obsession. I don’t remember ever sharing it with anybody else until I got to college. It’s hard to believe now, but Python was not mainstream at all – they were the rude upstarts, the sick and twisted weirdos. (For one thing, they sure dressed up as women a lot!) Their fans were nerds, social outcasts. They didn’t rely on the drug humor or political references of their hip American counterparts, but they weren’t old school clowns either. This was still the era of The Carol Burnett Show and Dean Martin roasts. The Pythons were way too smart and subversive for the unwashed masses – it took a long time for everyone to get the joke.
It was a full four years after Holy Grail that Life Of Brian was released, their hilarious attack on blind religious faith (The sandal! No, the gourd!), and it would become their highest grossing film. It was another three years before Live At The Hollywood Bowl – a concert film, not a ‘real’ movie – and one more until The Meaning Of Life, which, I have to say, was a soul-crushing letdown to me at the time. And that was it…they were done. They split up to pursue their individual careers. Graham Chapman died in 1989. The fans got the occasional crumb here and there – culminating with their last inspired comic setpiece: the “accidental” spilling of Graham’s ashes at the Aspen Comedy Festival. But the cold hard truth was the party ended far, far too soon. Especially for us Americans who came late to the party to begin with…
Despite a wealth of material from the original TV shows, the records, the books, the films, I always felt cheated somehow. It all seemed strangely incomplete. Unfinished.
I realized my appetite for all things Python was pretty much unquenchable when even a six-hour documentary made in 2010 left me unsatisfied.
I would probably only be happy if I spent days with them over beers in a pub, asking questions and listening to them reminisce. Maybe even that wouldn’t do it.
You can never get quite enough of your heroes, I guess.
So, when I heard they were reuniting one last time – if only to get some retirement money and take a final bow – I was glad. What’s wrong with a live audience letting them know before they shuffle off their mortal coils just how much they were and are loved…and what a huge gift they gave us?
They deserved an encore.
I needed it too.
