And Now for Dead Parrots, Flying Sheep, and Cardinal Richelieu Impersonators

Cult Films and Midnight Movies "From High Art to Low Trash" Vol 1 By Tom Baker

As a child, getting home from school, I used to eagerly look forward to watching British sketch comedy legends Monty Python and their famous show "Monty Python's Flying Circus" rerun unaccountably on MTV during the late 1980s. Although the humor was a little too sophisticated for me, the show had a warm, if puzzling ambiance and often actresses that exposed a lot of cleavage. Which was enough to hold my attention. The flat, surrealistic animations, utilizing images culled from a hundred years earlier or thereabouts, were always grotesque good fun. The whole thing put me into an alternate world, and I wanted to learn from it, ironically.

(I had no way of knowing at the time that my own later creative outlet would NOT be focused, as it were, on humor.)

It was from Monty Python that I first learned of the Gumbies, the Dead Parrot, and how a chap might feel "a bit peckish" enough to eat the corpse of his mother. I learned that "nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition," and that Michael Palin could turn on the oily, all-American game show host charm when portraying an actor portraying the murderous Cardinal Richelieu. I learned that Arthur Putey was a poor put-upon nebbish who would sit impassively while his wife made out with the marriage counselor. Also, a shipwrecked man with a long beard and wild, unkempt hair would crawl through any environment to hoarsely exclaim "It's!"

Today, as dour and grim as the world and the ensuing decades have made me, it is still refreshing to be able to turn on YouTube, and laugh uproariously at the ancient old television sketches of "Confuse-A-Cat," and the poor Italian teacher (the late Terry Jones) who knows less Italian than his weirdly all-Italian students (well, one, played by the late Graham Chapman is a German lad in lederhosen who is in the wrong class), who, of course, speak it perfectly. Terry Gilliam, though less seen than his co-Pythons (Eric Idle, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman) is every bit as essential, as the show would not be the absurdist, Dadaist landscape of admittedly crude cartoon imagery were it not for his brilliance: a black pram pushed about by a sinister old man devours those who stop to admire the baby inside; people are unaccountably "trapped in the body" of a decorated Victorian soldier, and you can hear them pleading and walking about inside; a large assortment of people cower under the billowing skirts of an 1880s spinster, before her head is sucked into her neck and replaced by that of a man. All of this is rendered in the most laughably strange and disorienting fashion, the animations segueing into the various segments, where men shoot pigs after accidentally sitting on them, and a world of Supermans is waiting eagerly for salvation from (drum roll please!) "BICYCLE REPAIR MAN!"

My favorite sketch, though, involves Graham Chapman and Carol Cleaveland sitting in a restaurant. When Chapman complains that his fork is "a little bit dirty," it causes much wailing and gnashing of teeth with the waiter, manager, and cook, and all three come out, exclaim their despair, and commit suicide, leaving the restaurant floor littered with corpses. Chapman then says, as the punchline, "It's a good thing I didn't say anything about the dirty bowl." (Or something like that. I can't remember exactly, but there's a boo hiss on the laugh track.)

So much of the genius of Python lies in their lampooning of the effete, upper-crust British class structure, and their stereotypically unperturbability in the face of the absurd. John Cleese plays a BBC news presenter often, one who, at one point, is kidnapped by cartoon robbers or anarchists, pushed onto a truck, driven to a pier, and pushed off the edge, all the while calmly reading the news, as if nothing out of the ordinary is occurring at all.

In another sketch, he's a stock market tycoon who calmly and dryly extolls the Malthusian virtues of torturing and killing off the poor.

The normal order of things is distorted until they take on absurd proportions, making comments or revealing the absurdity by which we live our lives, carry our "standards" through to the breaking point of human decency; revealing the layer of absurdity which Albert Camus pointed out as the underpinning of human existence. One wonders what the early surrealists would have said about it, as influenced as they were by the Marx Brothers and Duck Soup. A sketch with Picasso painting a portrait while engaging in a bicycle race should have certainly caught the attention of J.G. Ballard, who wrote a similar piece reframing the Kennedy Assassination as a similar competition.

While not all sketches hit the mark, and some will leave you simply puzzled, "Monty Python's Flying Circus" is a welcome respite from the bilge that is considered "comedy" in our present day and age. Watching it again, through the magic of YouTube, brought back memories of being that young boy again, frantically searching for some key to the land of fantasy and humor, cast adrift and getting ready to embark on growing up in a so, so often humorless world.

And now for something completely different...

Monty Python's Flying Circus Playlist (YouTube)

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