Monty Python: Lust for Glory

David Sterritt and Lucille Rhodes
Published in Cineaste, 26.4  (2001: Fall), 18-23.

And now for something completely identical! More than twenty-five years after Monty Python's Flying Circus wrapped its final season, and eighteen years after the troupe capped its cinematic career with The Meaning of Life, all of its major works-the full Monty, so to speakare back on DVD and VHS, accompanied by supplementary materials that fans, scholars, and other obsessive-compulsives will be poring over for decades to come.

At once a mainstream comedy team, a performance-art troupe with boldly original ideas, and an object of near-cultish veneration by admirers around the world, Monty Python remains a touchstone of modernist humor even though its members long ago abandoned their tightly knit group identity. Revisiting the company's history and accomplishments is now easier than ever, thanks to the recent spate of video releases and Python-related books. A walk through their career has much to reveal about the evolution of contemporary British comedy as well as their own achievements in the realms of satire, absurdity, and silliness.

Although their output as a group is plentiful enough to fill a dozen DVDs, the Pythons have a fairly brief history of steady association. The legendary TV show that started it all, Monty Python's Flying Circus, premiered in October 1969 via the British Broadcasting Corporation, had a hiatus in 1971, then continued its run until early 1973. This period produced three series of thirteen episodes apiece, all written by and starring the full Python contingent-John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman, the only member now deceased, and Terry Gilliam, the non-British member who created the animated sequences. A fourth series of only six installments appeared in late 1974, but Cleese was absent from the screen, although he helped write some of the sketches. David Morgan's interview book Monty Python Speaks! reveals that the remaining Pythons found this truncated season uneven in quality and tone. But their disappointment over the show's dwindling momentum was counterbalanced by the American debut of the first series on a handful of PBS stations, in venues ranging from the unsurprising (New York, Chicago) to the surprising (Dallas, Buffalo) to the very, very surprising (Scranton, Erie, and little Watertown, N.Y.).

Five theatrical films are the other main pillar of the Python oeuvre. Chief among them are Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Gilliam/Jones, 1975) and Life of Brian (Jones, 1979), both razor-sharp historical comedies, and the episodic Meaning of Life (Jones, 1983), the last major project to involve all six members. The other films are And Now for Something Completely Different (Ian MacNaughton, 1971), which recycles earlier Python material, and Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (Terry Hughes, 1982), which provides the most extensive record of the troupe's onstage performing style. Other media endeavors include fourteen recordings and seven books, including three volumes based on their movies.

This is not an enormous body of work, but it's had enormous influence on largeand small-screen comedy, thanks partly to its high laugh content and partly to its innovations in comic writing and performance. One early sign of the group's originality was its decision to work as a consort of equals, never elevating a single member to star status-even though temptations tantalizingly arose, as when Cleese began to develop a large personal following and a set of escalating ambitions to go with it.

Another mark of the troupe's inventiveness is its rejection of familiar TV formulas, from standup joke-telling to sitcom-style narrative. In place of standard formats the troupe cultivated a stream-of-consciousness sensibility calling for mercurial change from one moment to the next. Even when a loosely strung story does unify an installment of the show, as happens in some of the later programs-Palin as a muddled chap on a cycling tour, for instance-its verbal and visual action follows the same free-association (il)logic that characterizes the installments with multiple sketches.

This emphasis on outlandish juxtaposition is encapsulated in Gilliam's animations, which join the segments of a given show by contributing yet another level of disjunction. What might have served as a smokescreen for continuity gaps becomes the mightiest continuity gap of them all-and a hugely effective one, since, as Gilliam has acknowledged, the ability to insert an animation at any given moment allows the Pythons to end a routine as soon as it reaches its comic climax. This eliminates the need for followthrough and denouement that they saw as built-in structural flaws of conventional TVsketch humor.

Ironically, the BBC gave the Pythons unwitting help by its diffident manner of launching the series. Uncertain to what audience the program would appeal-and worried that it might appeal to very few indeed-the network slipped it into a latenight timeslot that made it somewhat inconvenient to watch (in the prevideo era) and thereby lent it a tinge of the exotic and esoteric. After honing their skills on widely watched programs like The Frost Report and Do Not Adjust Your Set, the Pythons found themselves playing to what Palin later described as an audience of insomniacs and intellectuals. This isn't what they would have chosen, but it boosted the reputation for offbeat eccentricity that would become their calling card-and continued to serve them well when the Public Broadcasting Service put them on American airwaves after commercial networks showed little interest.

This aura of far-out originality paid particularly high dividends when it merged with the group's penchant for self-reflexive approaches to TV itself, going far beyond the dollops of mannerly lampoon being offered to English viewers by David Frost and company. In his hefty Monty Python Encyclopedia, critic Robert Ross points to the troupe's throwaway use of guest stars (Ringo Starr, Lulu) as evidence of their subversive attitude toward celebrity culture. He also cites a guest appearance by a newsreader from the rival ITV network as a near-revolutionary moment in British television, since it took an unprecedented shot at the sharply drawn boundary between ITV populism and BBC gentility. In our current age of niche markets and fragmented audiences, Ross observes, it's almost impossible to imagine the "massive war-lines" that existed in the Fifties and Sixties "between the cheap and cheerful entertainment of commercialism and the booming, experienced, educational voice of the Beeb."

Monty Python made the Beeb one of its favorite adversaries, bringing TV self-satire to levels hitherto unknown on either side of the Atlantic-even in smugly impertinent shows like Saturday Night Live, which the Pythons saw as a commercially minded, celebrity-centered vehicle given to cutting its own throat by inducing its stars to abandon ship for solo careers. Just as important, the Pythons wielded their satirical scalpels with enough canny wit to keep their best shows fresh and funny long after these specific culture wars faded from the screen.

Although video now puts the group's near-complete history at the fingertips of every fan, a grasp of the full Python picture requires a more extensive look into the past. The strongest single influence on its style was Spike Milligan, the writer-director-comedian who anarchized British radio in the Fifties with The Goon Show, did the same for TV with A Show Called Fred and Q, and made a handful of classic theatrical shorts including The Case of the Mukkinese Battlehorn (1956) and The Running, Jumping, and Standing Still Film (1960). Watch the beginning of the Battlehorn movie-a gloved hand smashing a museum showcase with a brick, then plunging into the wreckage and stealing the brick -and you have proto-Python zaniness in its purest form. Milligan later called the Pythons his "nephews," and they lionized his unflinching looniness from their formative years through their last major projects-even giving him a poignant cameo role in Life of Brian, where he plays a bearded old man who can't quite keep up with the Messianic fervor erupting around him.

While every member of the group was influenced by Milligan's mixture of surrealistic lampoon and button-pushing subtext, the deepest elements of the Python pedigree can be traced a lot further back than the Fifties. Ian McNaughton, longtime director of the Flying Circus program, recognized this when he rhetorically asked an interviewer whether The Goon Show could have found its distinctive personality if the Marx Brothers hadn't paved the way; whether the Marx Brothers would have emerged if not for the inspiration they drew from burlesque; and whether burlesque would have existed without the British music-hall scene before it. As college-trained comedians with copious amounts of book learning to supplement their well-tuned instincts, the Pythons were well aware of their forebears and the lessons to be learned from them -as their taste for historical satire and media-referential pastiche clearly shows.

Not surprisingly, college is where Python's five British constituents first came into contact with one another. Cleese and Chapman studied law and medicine (respectively) at Cambridge University, where an interest in performing led them both to the Footlights Club, a Cambridge institution for almost a century. Each year the club produced a show called the Footlights Review, reaching a high point when the 1960 edition-Beyond the Fringe-struck international box-office gold and made writerperformers Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller the "four most famous Englishmen until the Beatles came along," as the Encyclopedia puts it. Riding this wave, Cleese and Chapman created the club's 1962 presentation, Double Take, which got engagements in the United States and New Zealand over the next couple of years and helped Cleese land a writing gig with Frost's fledgling TV hit, That Was the Week That Was. Idle entered the Footlights in 1963, completing what would become the Python troupe's Cambridge contingent.

Over at Oxford University, meanwhile, history majors Jones and Palin teamed up in 1963 to write revue sketches and slapstick routines. Later they moved to television with The Frost Report and sketches for Marty Feldman, then a rising comedian. Eventually they joined Idle on script work for Do Not Adjust Your Set, a children's TV show that they saw as an apt vehicle for the childlike (i.e, crazy and anarchic) humor they wanted to cultivate. Palin and Jones also wrote and acted in The Complete and Utter History of Britain, which Jones-already a disciple of Buster Keaton, insisting that beauty and integrity are indispensable ingredients of worthwhile comedy-later found the most Pythonlike of these early television efforts,

Gilliam, a former advertising artist and aspiring cartoonist, came to London after fleeing the United States in disgust at American arrogance and hypocrisy during the Vietnam era. He was creating collage-like animations for Do Not Adjust Your Set by 1969, but he'd first encountered a future Python four years earlier at Harvey Kurtzman's influential American humor magazine Help!, where he succeeded future feminist leader Gloria Steinam as assistant editor-just in time to supervise a photo shoot of Cleese for a fumetto-type feature about a man who becomes sexually obsessed with his little girl's doll. ("Mommy, my Barbie's hair is all mussed up! And her clothes are all over the place!") Increasingly wellversed in one another's styles and ideas, and increasingly well-known for their stage and media credits, the five Brits and one Yank formally coalesced into Monty Python in spring of 1969, motivated partly by mutual respect and partly by awareness of the freedom offered to comedy writers by the BBC, which tended to be more interested in keeping costs down than in supervising script content.

These matters of Python prehistory are significant since they illuminate details of personality and predilection that would shape the troupe's work for years to come. With some justification, the British members are often lumped together as middle-class Oxbridge types, and they did share certain outlooks on the world. All came originally from the provinces, for instance, and tended to see London as "slightly the enemy," in Palin's words. All grew up in bourgeois surroundings, as well, inheriting a slight degree of awe and suspicion toward professions like law and education, which they parodied so relentlessly.

One shouldn't generalize about them too freely, however, since they didn't drop their diverse approaches to life and work any more than they overcame the friendly rivalries induced by their Oxford and Cambridge backgrounds. Cleese and Chapman usually wrote together, specializing in carefully structured, verbally elaborate sketches that often start with a confrontation between two contrasting characters. (This reflected their own contrasts: Cleese focused and methodical, Chapman scattered and intuitive.) Jones and Palin formed another team, gravitating toward more visually oriented and eccentrically paced material. Idle preferred writing alone, spinning some of the group's most flamboyant wordplay, and Gilliam devised his free-form animations in comparative isolation.

These patterns persisted for years, as did the troupe's overall working habits-writing their scripts on carefully timed schedules, reading their sketches aloud for comment (and sometimes rejection) by the other members, and making group decisions about who would play which role in which sketch, regardless of who wrote the material in the first place. Tensions arose, as when Chapman's alcoholism complicated the shooting of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but in general these highly idiosyncratic talents worked together smoothly and efficiently.

Still, no troupe lasts forever. While some commentators feel Python disbanded primarily because individual members were eager for solo flights-Cleese as a comic star in Fawlty Towers and elsewhere, Gilliam as the director of increasingly ambitious feature films, Idle as an author and songwriter, and so on-the group's comic energy was manifestly on the wane by 1974. Cleese gives what may be the most bluntly candid assessment in The Life of Python, a BBC documentary available as an A&E video release. "We were repeating ourselves," he recalls. "I felt [Chapman] and I only wrote two genuinely original things in the whole of the last series [and] I felt that everyone else's material was also repetitive, and that if anyone did a sketch I could say, 'It's that sketch from the first series combined with that sketch from the second series....' Once you could begin to identify sketches like that, I thought, why are we doing it?"

ython admirers will find an unlimited number of entry points into this material, but certain characteristics stand out in particularly high relief when the movies and TV shows are consumed in the concentrated sessions that video allows. Among the most striking is the political dimension of the Pythons' comic world. There is little evidence that any Python thought of himself as a political comedian, much less a political commentator. Still, these were educated entertainers with ideas and opinions, and while intelligence and intellectuality needn't go together-Chapman, for example, was both a trained physician and the troupe's most notoriously scatterbrained member-it isn't surprising that coherent social, cultural, and political views made their way into the Python mix.

This is nowhere more evident than in Life of Brian, accurately held by most critics to be the group's most successful large-scale work on sociopolitical as well as comic, narrative, and esthetic grounds. Chapman plays the title character, a part-Jew-part-Roman man who's mistaken for the Messiah by a motley band of all-too-eager followers, even as Jesus himself sermonizes and allegorizes somewhere off-screen at the same moment Brian's increasingly absurd life is unfolding. Brian's adventures take many forms, from his efforts to escape the adulation of his acolytes to the kidnapping of Pontius Pilate's wife by a Jewish liberation group he joins. The tragedy of his ultimate fate-crucifixion with other transgressors-is counterpointed by the comedy of its treatment, as a fellow sufferer admonishes the whole cross-hanging gang to smile, whistle, and look on the bright side of life. Rarely have the sins of the Roman Empire and the conventions of the Hollywood cinema been so scathingly skewered in a single stroke of truly inspired satire.

One reason for this film's overall success as a political satire is its success as a sustained story with three-dimensional characters, a vividly etched historical setting, and a neatly integrated set of carefully developed subtexts. Four of these subtexts stand out as the most important: the conformity and mindlessness of conventional religious belief; the arbitrary nature of personal and political power; the complexity of nationalism and colonialism in world history; and the ease with which legitimate political discourse shades into self-serving ideological cant.

Far from being subtly embedded in the film's comedy-driven narrative, these points of interest leap to attention with a force and clarity that Bertolt Brecht would have applauded. The commentary on religious tradition starts at the very beginning, as the Magi pay their respects to the infant Messiah, then grab back their gold, frankincense, and myrrh when they realize they've gone into the wrong house and kowtowed to an ordinary baby named Brian instead of the Jesus they're looking for. In commentaries on the DVD edition, various Pythons take the line that they never wanted to parody Jesus' actual life and message-the original title, Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory, was quickly scuttled-and that their targets were religious institutions rather than religious ideas. Yet the movie is supercharged with the notion that orthodox religious ideas are often (if not always) based on heedless selfdelusion, a reflexive need to find and follow authority figures, and the proneness of humanity to misapprehend and misunderstand the world.

These categories overlap, moreover: All three come into play when Brian and other characters hear Jesus give his Sermon on the Mount, eager to be in the presence of a putative Messiah but getting the words wrong ("Blessed are the cheesemakers?") and adding bad hermeneutics for good measure ("It clearly refers to any manufacturer of dairy products"). Later scenes bring out a more particularized target of the movie: the division of Judaism and Christianity into sects and cults that often war with one another. Members of the People's Front of Judea despise the Judean People's Front and the Judea Popular People's Front more than they despise the Romans themselves; and Brian's new followers split almost instantly into factions that debate whether the master's sandal (which slipped off his foot as he ran from them) or his gourd (a meaningless object he acquired haphazardly) is the holy relic they should worship.

Foolish arguments play a part in the film's lampooning of political discourse, as well. In a richly parodic scene aimed at both revolutionary rhetoric and identity politics, a character played by Idle interrupts talk about overthrowing the Romans with calls for female power, finally revealing his personal desire for a life more self-determined than nature is prepared to give him. The dialog here is mercilessly sharp:

Eventually admitting that he has no womb or other child-bearing equipment, he decides that recognition of his "right to have babies" is enough to satisfy him. What's the point of his victory? "It's symbolic of our struggle against oppression," says Palin, frantically rationalizing the situation. "It's symbolic of his struggle against reality," retorts an exasperated Cleese.

Even more eloquent is the classic Python scene where the People's Front of Judea bolster their commitment to the cause-and the strength of their egos-by rehashing how harsh the Romans' domination has been. "What have the Romans ever done for us?!" asks PFJ leader Cleese with great indignation. But there are answers to this question, and one by one the members blurt out responses, causing Cleese to modify his position one increment at a time. Structurally, this scene resembles the great Spanish Inquisition sketch on the Flying Circus show, as a dramatic statement is ludicrously modified until its effect is lost; but politically, it's a sophisticated take on the multifaceted nature of colonial experience, which is far less monolithic than political polemicists often acknowledge. "Apart from the sanitation," thunders Cleese at the end of the sequence, "medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health-what have the Romans ever done for us?"

The prevalence of sociopolitical satire in Life of Brian doesn't mean the Pythons can't pull their punches-or make outright compromises-to attract as wide an audience as they feel the traffic will bear. Among the deleted scenes included on the DVD is a punchy episode about a character called Otto, the leader of a Semitic suicide squad whose insignia combines the Star of David with the swastika. He arrives near the end of the movie, searching for the Messiah who will, he's convinced, "save Israel by ridding it of the scum of non-Jewish people, making it pure-no foreigners, no riffraff, no gypsies!" In their commentary, Idle and Gilliam claim that the scene was eliminated because it slowed the movie's comic pace and confused preview audiences by introducing a new character. But it's hard to see how Otto is any more a "new character" than, say, the beard salesman who interferes with Brian's flight to safety a bit earlier. And sure enough, Idle finally admits that the scene's status boiled down to a question of whether its comic value was enough to justify the potential offensiveness of portraying a proSemitic fascist with stridently Hitlerian ideas.

Mainstream comedians though they ultimately are, the Pythons have nonetheless shown a commendable proclivity for performances, images, and concepts that seem outrageously-or refreshingly-out of sync with today's notions of sociopolitical good taste. This is partly a function of the period during which they reached their peak, from the Flying Circus premiere in 1969 through Life of Brian in 1979, since at that time the entertainment scene was somewhat more relaxed about possibly offensive nuances than it has become in more recent decades. Still, the main motivation for this calculated indulgence in tastelessness-what theorist Mikhail Bakhtin would call the carnival spirit of strategically inverted values-was the Python sensibility itself, so sweeping in its satirical scope that it rarely took time to notice whether some demographic group might feel affronted or antagonized. The hugely popular "pepperpot" characters aren't just women with shrill voices and monotonous minds, for instance; they're men playing women with shrill voices and monotonous minds-and when a female character is portrayed by a female Python partner (usually Carol Cleveland, good sport par excellence) you can count on her personality being defined more by her hair and breasts than by her words and thoughts. This stuff is less an attack on correct feminist thinking than on correct thinking, period, and if it scuttles all sanctioned ideas of decency, propriety, and refinement, that's pretty much what the Pythons intend.

Ditto for enormous amounts of outlandish gay parody (sometimes led by Chapman, the group's only gay member) and various kinds of race-based humor; see Episode 33 for a dose of the former, with Chapman himself as homophobe-in-chief, and Episode 29 for a good example of the latter, with Palin and Jones in blackface roles that make Bamboozled look almost tame. If there's any excuse for all this, it's that (a) other Python sketches are full of straight white males who also act like idiots, and (b) let's face it, it's funny. But carnival theorists in general and Python loyalists in particular will contend that no excuses are necessary.

A different sort of Python trait is the group's aforementioned fondness for media satire. This sometimes hits targets close to home, as in the parody of a BBC instructional documentary entitled "How Not To Be Seen," wherein characters who don't manage "not to be seen" are promptly blown up by the film's officious narrator, unsubtly suggesting that the BBC has the power to annihilate anyone who doesn't meet its preposterous standards. Cinema takes many satirical hits, as well, and their variety is impressive: an existential drama improvised in a junkyard; parodies of Art Cinemah a la Luchino Visconti and Michelangelo Antonioni; a Sam Peckinpah version of Salad Days; a Garden Club show replete with Ken Russelltype tits and ass; and so on. At times the Flying Circus program itself provides a starting point for social or political humor. One episode begins with an announcement that Her Majesty the Queen is scheduled to tune in, and then presents two of the most flagrant gross-out skits in Circus history-a report on cannibalism in the British Navy and the notorious undertaker sketch, which ends with the studio audience rising up in protest. God save the Pythons?

Two of the group's strongest affinities are with the Dada and Surrealist traditions. The first of these nourishes an antiart stance (or at least an antipretension stance) that underlies Python's quasipolitical eagerness to debunk the pompous and the pontifical. The second reveals-perhaps paradoxically-an artistic sophistication that enhances the Pythons' appeal for savvy spectators like the intellectuals and insomniacs who constituted their early audience. Examples abound, but one particularly uproarious instance appears in Episode 32, where a sketch about a naval expedition is populated by sailors who are also hippies with the names of female Hollywood stars interviewed by a journalist who turns into a pirate, all of which leads to a Yellow Submarine lampoon and a visit to a lake inside a London house. The satirical tactics here are richly heterogeneous, unified (if that's the word) only by a dreamish irrationality as bold as it is unflinching. Surrealism undergirds much of Python's output, but in offerings like this it reaches an oneiric intensity that spills over the boundaries of conventional comedy with extraordinary abandon.

True to form, the DVD edition of Month Python's Flying Circus contains various extras. Some are useful, as when a click of the remote switches you from a TV sketch to an in-concert remake of the same bit-allowing comparisons between the troupe's live and on-camera styles, and between renditions of similar material in different time periods. Other supplements will interest only Python buffs, and even hard-core fans may soon stop bothering with 'dictionary' definitions of Python neologisms, Gilliam animations out of context, and random sketches from other discs in the series. Such materials recall the inspired title of a CD-ROM released by the Pythons a few years ago: Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time.

The feature-film DVDs are largely free of such frivolities. This is good insofar as it cuts down prices a little, but it's disappointing that a film as ingenious as Monty Python and the Holy Grail has no extras to offer but some trailers. (Grail is another parody with a political edge, incidentally, debunking a central Western power myth and playing Brechtian havoc with traditionalist ideas ranging from benevolent despotism to chivalric masculinity.) It's a pleasure to report that the excellent Life of Brian fares very well in the supplement department, however, with rich commentaries, an informative 'making of documentary, and remarkable deleted scenes. Among the latter are the Otto episode described earlier and, more briefly, an exquisite shot of Cleese doing a silly-walk-style dance on a distant hilltop.

There are various reasons why such memorable moments landed on the cuttingroom floor, and these can be as engrossing as the material itself. Some have to do with political content, as with the Otto scene, while others are based on artistic judgments related to pace, timing, and rhythm. Sometimes different Pythons have different accounts of what was decided and why. It's fascinating to hear Idle explain a trim by referring to three-act narrative structure and proper story development-and then hear Gilliam argue that lively moment-by-moment bits are far more important than correct plot construction.

Such comments offer revealing insights into the thinking of individual Pythons, especially when they go beyond creative methods to esthetic and even philosophical matters. Remember the bearded prisoner chained to the wall in the Life of Brian dungeon? Palin analyzes him in psychological terms, saying he's an inherently funny character because he insists on behaving in such a curmudgeonly manner toward his new cellmate, the only person who could possibly become his friend and companion. By contrast, Gilliam discusses him in political terms, saying the poor creep is funny because he insists on being a raging right-winger with a "law and order" fixation even though he's a pathetic victim of exactly that ideology. Both are right, and both offer much Pythonic food for thought.

Life of Brian is the best of Python's feature DVDs, but all of their good material holds up well on video. In visual terms, the troupe usually thought small, which helps explain why the epic-prone Gilliam really needed to strike off on his own. (His commentary on the Brian disc reveals how irked he was when Jones's camera positions failed to capture the grandeur of the sets he'd designed.) Mixed and matched or watched straight through, the Python oeuvre has yet to be surpassed. It's hard to imagine a time when creators and consumers of comedy won't be watching them for ideas, inspiration, and fun.