Monty Python's Flying Circus

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Monty Python's Flying Circus

That a British comedy series dealing with, among other things, the Upper-Class Twit of the Year Contest, the Ministry of Silly Walks, and a public Argument Clinic would become a cultural phenomenon in the United States during the 1970s was, as comedian Eric Idle said, the last thing in the world one would expect. Nonetheless, Monty Python's Flying Circus, the show Idle helped create, became a significant part of American culture in the years immediately following the Watergate scandal, creating a large cult following among young, college-educated viewers and influencing American comedy and television for decades to come.

The roots of Monty Python's Flying Circus can be found in the satirical comedy boom occurring in both America and Britain during the late 1950s and early 1960s. While satire in the States was the province of nightclub comics and a few improvisatory workshops, in Britain it was centered at the Oxbridge hub of higher education. The Cambridge Footlights Club and similar groups at Oxford entertained both their university communities and theatregoers around the nation with revues of topical sketches, impersonations, and song parodies. Oxbridge satire made its way to British television in 1962, with the BBC's (British Broadcasting Corporation) That Was the Week That Was (TW3). Featuring a number of revue veterans, including inter-locutor David Frost, TW3 offered a weekly collection of topical skits, songs, and interviews presented in a bare-bones open studio that allowed viewers to see the mechanics of the show's production as it was going on. Though phenomenally popular, the show's barbed humor quickly ran afoul of both the Tory government and the BBC, which canceled the series at the end of 1963 in order to avoid political problems with upcoming elections. After a failed effort to revisit the TW3 format, Frost called on his Oxbridge connections to staff his 1966 BBC show, The Frost Report. John Cleese and Graham Chapman had written and performed for Footlights Club shows and tours, including one that played in New York in 1964. Eric Idle had followed Cleese and Chapman to Cambridge, where he became familiar to Frost. Terry Jones and Michael Palin, meanwhile, were working in various Oxford revues offering a more zany, absurdist humor than the topical sketches of the Footlights Club. Their work together on The Frost Report began a series of working relationships that culminated in 1969, when they rejoined as a group for a BBC series that would come to have a global effect on television comedy.

The first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, broadcast on October 5, 1969, featured sketches including a television show devoted to famous deaths, a parody of a BBC interview show, and a documentary on the weapon that won World War II: the funniest joke ever told. The sketches were interspersed with cut-out animation created by Minneapolis-born artist Terry Gilliam, with whom John Cleese had worked during his time in New York. The remaining 12 shows in the first Python series continued to develop the group's comedic style, one that was far less satiric, in terms of addressing topical issues and figures, than it was absurd, but one that was also relentlessly and at times viciously anti-authoritarian. Sketches that hilariously overturned familiar norms—a transvestite lumberjack, a pet shop owner who sells dead parrots—were joined with increasing frequency by comic attacks on the British government, the military, the Church of England, the landed aristocracy, and the legal, medical, and business communities. No institution was more ridiculed, however, than the television industry itself, both in numerous parodies of individual programs and genres and in the group's self-reflexive dismantlings of production conventions: the intrusion of opening and often phony closing credits at inappropriate places, the sudden appearance of "BBC officials" to comment on or complain about the show, the shortening of sketches by characters who decide that they are not funny.

Despite regional scheduling difficulties, the first series of Monty Python's Flying Circus attracted a substantial late-night audience, strong critical praise, and a firm BBC commitment for more shows. A second series of 13 episodes ran in fall 1970, and a third series was broadcast in winter 1971-1972. Meanwhile, word of the show was beginning to spread beyond its homeland. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation picked up the first series in 1970, making it available to American viewers near the border. The troupe turned a number of sketches from the first series into an eponymous record album in 1970, followed by three more albums in 1971 through 1973. Copies of the albums, as well as collections of Python material in book form, began to make their way into the United States during the early 1970s. Sketches from the first two series of the show were collected in a film, And Now, For Something Completely Different, that was released, to less than overwhelming results, in 1972. The group itself, touring Canada to take advantage of its popularity there, even went to Los Angeles to make an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1973. Immediately afterward, however, John Cleese left the troupe. The remaining members went on to produce one more six-episode series for the BBC in fall 1974, which seemed to be the final voyage for Monty Python's Flying Circus.

The end of the show in Britain, however, was merely its beginning in the United States. The BBC, having found an American audience for its documentaries and its dramatic serialization of literary works on PBS (Public Broadcasting System) in the early 1970s, was working to develop the market further. While the often absurd, often savage humor of Monty Python's Flying Circus lacked the comfort and the cultural cachet of Civilization and the various BBC serials presented under the Masterpiece Theatre rubric, PBS affiliate KERA-TV in Dallas began to run the show in summer 1974. Its immediate success there led PBS affiliates across the country, as well as a few commercial stations, to pick up the show. By spring 1975, Monty Python's Flying Circus was on the air in more than 130 markets, attracting both sizable and fanatically devoted audiences from New York to Iowa to Sacramento. The show's success was augmented by the 1975 American release of the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a comic retelling of the Arthurian legends involving dismemberment, orgies, the military use of excrement, and a vicious killer rabbit, as well as a typical Python ending that ridiculed the conventions of filmmaking as thoroughly as the film did the conventions of the epic.

The American popularity of Monty Python's Flying Circus in the mid-1970s can be attributed to several factors. Just as the Oxbridge satire movement in Britain and the nightclub satire comedy scene in America were concomitant developments, the shift from pointed topical satire to a more absurd and archetypal form of humor occurred simultaneously. During the period in which Python ascended in Britain, American comics such as George Carlin and Richard Pryor and comedy groups including the Firesign Theatre and the Committee found both critical and commercial success by infusing the barbs of their predecessors with both the political anger and the broad countercultural "us vs. them" sentiments of the late 1960s. The political and countercultural elements of their work also spoke to the audience they were priming for Python —in the decade between 1965 and 1975, the population on American college campuses, the center of political and cultural revolt, rose by 70 percent. A group rich in educational and cultural capital, it was an audience that could get what critics called the "overgraduate humor" of Python sketches involving contests to summarize Proust, debates about Sartrean philosophy, and parodies of Pasolini films. It was also, more importantly, an audience that had grown up under the authority of television and that was innately familiar with the conventions comically demystified by Python.

The absurdity of Python sketches was matched at times, however, by their reception in America. A 1975 ABC broadcast of three episodes of the final six episode Python series, which had not been released for syndication, led to a historic legal battle culminating in a United States Court of Appeals ruling that ABC had infringed on the troupe's copyright by cutting material in order to include commercials. In a landmark settlement, the troupe regained all distribution rights from the BBC and took back the episodes purchased by ABC. It would control its own destiny—at least as far as American television was concerned. Movies, though, were a different matter. The 1979 Python film Life of Brian, a mock Biblical epic in which a poor sap called Brian Cohen is named the Christ, was condemned by numerous religious groups, picketed in many communities, and not distributed to others. The controversy failed to keep Python fans away—the film made $10 million in its initial American release.

The American popularity of Monty Python's Flying Circus led to mobbed live performances in New York in 1976 and Los Angeles in 1980 (the latter recorded on film) at which audiences recited sketches line for line along with the comedians. Meanwhile, projects by individual members of the group found a ready market in the United States. John Cleese's Fawlty Towers became almost as popular as Python when it was imported to PBS stations in the late 1970s; Michael Palin's Ripping Yarns also achieved critical and popular success during its syndicated PBS run; and Eric Idle's Meet the Rutles, a documentary spoof on a faux-Beatles pop band, was aired on NBC. At the same time, Terry Gilliam began a prolific career as a film director with Jabberwocky and Time Bandits, both of which featured Python members in the cast.

The most important legacy of Monty Python's Flying Circus in American culture, however, was the development of late-night sketch comedy series that sought to capture the vitality, if not all of the savagery and absurdity, of the British original. Both Saturday Night Live, whose creator, Lorne Michaels, idolized Python and used it as a model for his own show, and the Canadian SCTV, which itself became an imported cult favorite in the late 1970s, owed their existence to the success of Monty Python's comic attacks on authority and television culture.

Since 1980, the original Monty Python's Flying Circus has remained a part of the American television landscape, with runs of the series on the MTV (Music Television) and Comedy Central cable networks, as well as continued playings on local PBS stations. The group reformed for a film, The Meaning of Life, in 1983, while numerous individual projects—Gilliam's films Brazil and The FisherKing, Palin's BBC travel documentaries, Cleese's film A Fish Called Wanda, and his guest appearances on American situation comedies—have continued to receive critical and popular acclaim. Graham Chapman's death in 1989 seemed to end any hope for any further group projects; in 1998, however, the remaining members of the troupe announced that they planned to reunite the following year for film and live projects. Whether their new work attains the stature and influence of the original Monty Python's Flying Circus remains to be seen. The fact that United States audiences were still interested in what the comic purveyors of upper class twits, silly walks, and argument clinics might have to say 30 years later, however, suggests the lasting hold Python has had on American culture.

—Jeffrey S. Miller