‘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.
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