Monty Python's Flying Circus: The Comedy Show That You Should Gobble Up

‘Alduce me to introlow myself’.

It is a parody of Agatha Christie’s drawing room murder mysteries and while any other comedian or comedy troupe would have either mocked at silly clues or unnecessarily convoluted intentions, trust an intrepid, irreverent gang of half a dozen British comedians to do the unexpected. Instead of all these expected tropes, we get Inspector Tiger (yes, that is his name) who fumbles with even basic English, as evidenced in that hilarious way he chooses to introduce himself to a roomful of suitable befuddled ladies and gents. 

As the sketch progresses, more lunacy piles up in the most audacious ways, the stuff of inanity that is too brilliant and subversive to be spoiled for effect. Indeed, do you really need a punchline or an obvious in-joke when you have a bumbling inspector and his equally ridiculous peers? 

That is Monty Python for you, a bunch of gifted goofballs, namely Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, with an undeniably sleazy name and hailed by many as the Beatles of comedy. Both things are true about them; they were never afraid to spice up their charades with cheeky, even malicious ribaldry and they were, indeed, worthy of that comparison. Like the Fab Four, this Stunning Six broke all the boundaries in landing punchlines with the simplest trick-never really using a punchline. Except, maybe, an armoured knight socking a chicken at one’s head or even one of the six breaking not just the fourth wall in the room but every fourth wall there ever was

My delirious love for Python began, inevitably, with two quintessential movies. Holy Grail is a gigantic lark of a film, a maddeningly silly medieval swashbuckler which never loses a chance to mock the serious pretensions of its genre, from cowardly knights to murderous rabbits to misadventures right down to opening credits with moose.  

Life Of Brian had me both laughing and grinning cynically at the same time; the humour, even when outrageous and deliciously anarchic, was just so rich with incisive, almost razor-sharp satire that the laughs felt not merely playful but also profound. The film deals with so much more than just a jab at bogus religion and foolishly conceived blind faith; it also pokes ruthlessly, magnificently at left-wing revolutionaries, ludicrous sensationalism of violence and even Latin lessons at school. 

Such is the breadth of their ideas and humour, such is the dazzling wealth of genuine quirk and hilarity that the characters, played by each of the Pythons in unforgettably indelible turns, that you will be awe-struck as much as amused to death. 

And yet the moment that really made me fall head over heels in love with Monty Python is just one conversation from the latter film, one about a Roman centurion named as ‘Naughtius Maximus’ and then about a ‘friend in Rome’ called ‘Biggus Dickus’ and how all hell breaks loose.

The Pythons were never really afraid to get their hands dirty, as evidenced throughout their iconoclast series Monty Python’s Flying Circus (to which I will come in a bit), the premise of the concerned film itself (dealing with a hapless Jew youngster mistaken to be the Messiah by confused Judeans) or even their darkest, nastiest film, The Meaning Of Life that knocked out gut-wrenching gags on organ theft, obesity and senseless war. But this simple bit about Roman soldiers sharing schoolboy joke names hit me hard on the funny bone. So much for the might of the Empire. 

The beauty of their humour lies somewhere in that deceptive subtlety, of how the brilliantly layered writing conceals satirical sophistication beneath the silliest, most outrageous of surfaces. The films are filled with such marvels of writing, performance and timing, from villagers debating whether a woman is a witch or not to a blasphemer being stoned for just saying ‘Jehovah’. But as the relentlessly addictive Flying Circus episodes prove,  these were also comedians who mastered the surreal form of the farce to perfection and that also includes breaking into surprisingly melodious numbers, performing the craziest gags or even garbling in foreign languages and raving and ranting until that armoured knight came along. 

The Pythons sure know how to pull the ground beneath our feet. So many sketches in the TV series and the films begin without warning and proceed in a direction that could never have been predicted first-hand. For instance, there is that beginning to the It’s The Arts episode in which men discuss a German composer with an unbelievably long name. The brilliant comedians play their ingenious trick without stretching it too far and know just when to pull the breaks. Talk about economy.

Then again, comes the Science-Fiction Sketch taking up almost the half of an episode and fashioned like a miniature alien invasion feature film. I leave the novice to unearth the utterly unpredictable marvels of comic writing that pop up at every turn of the plot but I can say that you might be distracted by that gorgeous bimbo who is nevertheless a cut smarter than the men around her. 

Their most famous sketches are not just great for the jokes and one-liners that they carry but also for the utterly unhinged, jaunty way in which they progress and end. Take a look at Dead Parrot for instance. The underlying concept here is itself of the sheer futility of any discussion when the irate customer has already been sold an ex-parrot by a slippery shopkeeper and futility is what the sketch comes to in the end. Compare that with the endlessly quotable Cheese Shop sketch, in which the fun comes not so much from the straight path that it takes than the sheer variety of cheeses discussed that make us feel, like that exasperated customer, a bit ‘peckish’ ourselves for fermented curd.

What further makes each of these delicious sketches, filled to the brim with the craziest quirks, are the routinely terrific actors themselves. Cleese, that Daddy-Long-Legs smooth-talking and bellowing cynic leads the pack along with classmate Chapman, who best portrays the stiff upper lip of Britain’s middle class milieu, alongside Terry Jones whose best parts are of the matronly English women, worried about the most trivial of things. Alongside them are Eric Idle with those sparklingly innocent eyes and also the writer and performer of some of the most sharpest sketches (and also the most musical of all the Pythons) and Michael Palin, the charismatic chameleon of the pack, the one able to play a dull chartered accountant wishing to be a lion tamer and even a shopkeeper who does not know what a ‘palindrome’ means. 

And then there is the legendary Terry Gilliam. The only Python to migrate from across the Atlantic, he lent not only a whacked-out wackier sense of disorienting chaos with those unforgettably raunchy and jaunty animations, fashioned out of old Victorian-era photographs and totems and crazed, even perverted imagination, but also an edge that was both boisterous and bleeding. He himself showed up in most episodes as the armoured knight and even in memorable bits in the films (for instance, the wizened Bridge Keeper in Holy Grail) but it is his bizarre designs and always recklessly inventive animated creations, from cannibalistic baby prams to moustachioed stiff-upper-lipped Englishmen decapitated and knocked into the ground, that connected the brilliant writing of the other five members into a cohesive and stunningly ethereal whole. 

And so there is so much to enjoy here, so much to relish, from the most delicious absurdities, like a self-defence teacher paranoid about fruits to a murderous barber who wishes to be a lumberjack to Vikings singing about tinned Spam (and giving birth to a new name for unwanted trash in our email inboxes) to argument clinics to men with tape recorders up their noses. And yet, even with all these nutty wonders and the flawless writing, almost comparable to Wilde or Saki in its wry and brilliantly judged turns of phrase, the thing that makes Monty Python as special as the Beatles is their inherent pride of being English. 

When I visited London recently, one of the things that struck me were the spree of posters and stickers at the immigration counter at Heathrow, which prided on the success of the British customs and police officials in combating narcotics smuggling. Instantly, I was reminded of that unforgettable sketch when Graham Chapman barges in a house as an archetype London bobby and sniffs officiously for 'certain substances of an illicit nature'. I started chuckling to myself, remembering that fine punchline in the end, 'Blimey, whatever did I give the wife?'. 

From dotty old ladies munching English masterpieces at the National Gallery to bumbling cops, from the Pepperpot ladies to the stiff military bigwigs, from the suburban old-timers to the sleazy youngsters, the whole of Flying Circus is so distinctly about London in its assortment of crackling characters and comedic fireworks that you are bound to feel that earthy, English flavour that you feel in the music of the Beatles. Sure, they do snigger, from time to time, at both frosty Europeans and feckless Americans but for most part, the joke is on the English, especially at the older lot, who come across as hilariously insane when complaining about sketches in those nutty letters. 

To the uninitiated, I recommend to sink into the colourful, even almost kitschy and beguilingly brilliant world of the world's most legendary comedy group with that most irresistible of all names. Do whatever you have to do but always look at this light side of life. 

Sanju: A Superstar Performance In A Superstar Masala Entertainer

Let's be honest: nobody expects biographies of celebrities to be revealing character studies. 

There is a reason behind this fallacy of any biopic about a much celebrated and controversial public figure: it has to do with just how we, as the spectators, resort to extreme viewpoints in our appraisal of the said celebrity. A celebrity, by default, is someone who is both loved and lambasted, hailed and hated, sympathised with and reviled. It is only a rare and discerning biopic that can balance both these extremes and even then, the perspective leans heavily towards any one of them. Just watch Richard Attenborough's Chaplin for instance. 

There is then, uncannily, much common between that fundamentally flawed portrait yet often ambitious and stirring film and Rajkumar Hirani's sprawling yet quite seamlessly entertaining film and the biggest similarity may be just how both the films don't skimp on showing us the seams of the real-life silver screen legends they portray but they do it with a touch of sympathy and on a truly larger-than-life and even formulaic fashion too. It is also here that the similarities end as Sanju has, fortunately, a lot more to it than what its unassuming, even naive simplicity would suggest. 

Sanjay Dutt was always the trouble-maker, the never-to-grow-up bad boy of Bollywood, who also happened to be, accidentally, a gritty and macho leading man best cut for the angry, sneering antihero of many a Mahesh Bhatt potboiler in the 80s and 90s. His life, on the other hand, was punctuated with fiery, audacious scandal; his career, save for those gems that surfaced only now and then, was punctuated mostly by failure and ridicule and given that his prowess and public image remain debatable to the day, it is natural that this should be such promising, rollicking premise. 

Trust Hirani and co-writer Abhijat Joshi, two foxy collaborators who can play on the most obvious setups and subvert them not so subtly, to turn that premise into something unexpected: an emotional, even pulpy, yet intimate tale of fatherhood and friendship that works smoothly and self-assuredly in its own pace, propelled as it is with a barnstorming performance holding this film together with truly awe-inspiring ferocity. 

Little doubt has been left of Ranbir Kapoor's infallible strengths at portraying young bravado, man-child predicament and rousing emotional conviction with a spontaneity and persuasiveness that never falters. But the actor is given here a particularly tall order, to capture the sensational and notorious actor not just in his jaunty physicality but also in his befuddled, boorish and bullheaded spirit. It is not even the slightest attempt at mimicry; it is mesmerising, maddening and quite magnificently entertaining. 

The actor never ever misses his step or plays a false note; it is a showy, swaggering role from start to finish but Kapoor also lends him vulnerability, sly wit, winsome affability and even dashing, if foolhardy, heroics to spellbinding effect. There is so much here to love and treasure, from him bubbling with sleazy, smarmy enthusiasm to winning over all skeptics with much generous sincerity. This is a performance as pitch-perfect as it can get, ratcheting up the fireworks splendidly. 

As does Hirani, who stirs up drama truly on a larger and even darker scale than he has done before, painting Sanju with the broadest strokes and yet the confidence of his approach drives the film forward with a swift thrust and steady pace that makes all the stakes so believable. 

We see a doe-eyed Sanjay snort his first line of cocaine and then pounce impulsively at the challenge of lip-syncing, we are thrilled and delighted to see him hoodwink tough gangsters and we are equally roused and enthralled at him crusading his own cause through radio inside the walls of his prison. The filmmaker lets us glide through each of these pivotal incidents of his life, at times also pushing for unmistakably poetic and even poignant; in one particularly tender and crushing moment, the desperately addicted Sanjay hallucinates his mother breathing her last when in the real world, he was not even there to witness the same moment.

The frequently formulaic treatment, even as the film is well-shot and crisply edited, is undermined effectively by just how willing Hirani and Joshi are on occasion to probe into the darker gist of Sanjay's tale with brisk efficiency. Sanju does not shy away from the shattering severity of the actor's 'cold turkey' phase and bravely pumps up his ultimate redemption and it portrays the troubling facts of the allegations of his complicity in the 1993 serial bomb blasts with a reasonably grown-up seriousness. 

The signature wisecracking humour is there, however, in spades but while some of it is perversely and even ruthlessly uproarious, it is nevertheless spiky and pointed given just how actually bamboozled was the actor in real life in his younger days. It also becomes Marx Brothers-like in its acidic punch; at one point, a drowsy and all-too-recognisable politician's apathy to Dutt's woes hits closer home than it seems. 

This is, however, far from a perfect film. At heart, the script feels trapped between exploring the bigger picture of Dutt's successes and failures and looking inwards at his relationships and while it does a fair job of balancing both these facets, it falls short of being a bit more incisive. 

The supporting cast is mostly well-picked but some of them are given surprisingly little heft. Anushka Sharma's pink-bobbed and blue-eyed non-fiction writer Winnie Diaz is essentially a retread of her earlier roles and while Manisha Koirala looks quite authentically weary yet striking as an ailing Nargis Dutt, the actress never quite gets the leg room to prove more of her mettle, though her smiling and bright-eyed presence does make us smile too. 

A more serious-minded director would made it a full-fledged analysis of the harsher realities while a more irresponsible director would have been content to just sympathise. I am secretly glad that this did not happen. Instead, Hirani settles rather delightfully for the two key relationships of Dutt's life, one with his father, the domineering yet warm veteran actor Sunil Dutt and the trusty yet objective friend (I will come to him in a while). 

Paresh Rawal is a bit of a misfire as Sunil Dutt and I am not referring to the absence of physical similarity but rather to how the otherwise talented actor plays it safe, bringing welcome warmth and wisdom to his patriarch but little individuality of his own. And while Hirani hands him and Sanjay several moving moments of genuine rapport, including the father reminiscing fondly about his memories and the son lapping them up absent-mindedly, the overall effect lacks a bit of the expected punch.

On the other hand, Vicky Kaushal plays Dutt's best friend Kamlesh with such gloriously reckless spontaneity that next to the impulsive, cocky leading man, he becomes Sanju's most endearing character. He bravely embraces the Gujarati stereotypes of his character arc and fleshes them with much effervescence and ernest charm and, also, becomes the moral compass of the film as we witness even the most pivotal proceedings through his perspective. And it was quite delightful to find the criminally under-utilised Sayaji Shinde after a long time.

In the end, even with the flaws and snags, Sanju is a Hirani film, warts and all, and it does make one smile more widely than ever as it hurtles towards its cheery yet refreshingly intimate climax that feels a more worthy celebration for Sanjay Dutt rather than his public acquittal from being defamed as a terrorist. As for the latter, even as the film does its share of whitewashing, it also makes uses it to make pointed stabs at the current miasma of fake headlines and tabloid reportage that lets cynicism prevail over hope. 'Don't you know it's gonna be all right?' this film seems to be crooning to the frenzied journalists so hungry on devouring up a public figure for his flaws without reporting the facts.

It is up to the incredible Kapoor to bring to life an equally incredible cinematic myth. He outdoes himself and delivers a portrayal that, like the film, is both larger-than-life yet intimate and ultimately heartfelt and, even like the best and most well-crafted propaganda cinema, surprisingly effective in end result. If Sanju appears too filmy to be real or believable, well then that was the case with the man himself.

My Rating: 4 Stars Out Of 5