Having met at university - Jones and Palin at Oxford; Cleese, Chapman and Idle were members of the famous Cambridge Footlights drama group - they wanted to work together on a new show that would push boundaries and not conform to the norms of television sketch comedy at the time.
Gilliam joined as an animator, but went on to become a full member of the group. Monty Python's Flying Circus changed the tone of British comedy when it launched later that year, and went on to inspire dozens of performers who grew up watching it. Making its debut late on a Sunday night on BBC One on 5 October , just before the weather bulletin, the irreverent sketch show aired until , earning BAFTA awards and even leading to a German spin-off thanks to its unique, stream-of-consciousness style.
In Flying Circus, Jones often appeared in drag, sometimes as a "haggard housewife," or nude, while his other characters included Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson, Cardinal Biggles of the Spanish Inquisition and Mr Creosote, the monstrously obese restaurant patron. Life Of Brian, when it followed, was attacked as blasphemous. Having been dropped by the production company - the bosses apparently not too happy after discovering the storyline - it was Beatle George Harrison who stepped in to help finance it.
Today, it is a consistent top-five charter in polls of the funniest films of all time. Jones also went on to direct The Meaning Of Life , the Pythons' last film together, which returned to sketches, loosely linked to follow the ages of man - and featured the very memorable song, Every Sperm Is Sacred. After their split in , each member had various successes with projects in film, TV and on stage, often continuing to work with one another. In , Graham Chapman passed away after cancer spread to his spinal cord.
The Pythons did reunite for benefit shows, but they officially discontinued reunions in Cristina Interiano The Observer. Share This Story. About Nicole Bilyak Contact Nicole. Cleese was in because you came to my room number. So what are we doing asking for identification? Does comedy have any surprises for you anymore?
Not many. Have you been following any of the controversies over free speech on college campuses? Jon Stewart said something like that to me about two years ago. But the thing about political correctness is that it starts as a good idea and then gets taken ad absurdum. And one of the reasons it gets taken ad absurdum is that a lot of the politically correct people have no sense of humor. Because they have no sense of proportion, and a sense of humor is actually a sense of proportion.
In my stage show I tell jokes that make the audience roar with laughter, jokes about the Australians or the French or the Canadians or the Germans or the Italians. This actually reminds me of an idea I had: Every year at the U. So to eliminate jokes that are at the expense of other people is to eliminate most jokes.
Francis of Assisi, because everything they do is pretty appropriate. Not Jesus, his followers. At what point are we allowed to make a joke? After the Charge of the Light Brigade, say, how many years had to pass for it to be acceptable to make jokes about the dead British?
Seven years. Of course, seven years. How foolish of me. So clearly, enough time had passed to allow for us to make jokes about the Vietnam War. Eighty percent of people out there on the sidewalk will tell you they are oppressed by the system.
You know this one? The story I then tell involves an American patrol boat in the Gulf of Mexico. The guy on the boat is cruising along, and suddenly sees two Mexicans going for the border. The others are already there.
Oy, John. But is that a nasty joke? Think about the content of it. The Mexicans are actually the heroes! There are millions of Mexicans in America. So is that a nasty story to tell? What I found surprising was that the least successful people supported Trump. You understand the wealthy wanting tax cuts, but why on Earth did the less successful people think Trump was going to do anything he said he was going to do to help them? The thing that astounded me as I looked around Colston Hall in Bristol is that quite a lot of the audience thought what they were seeing was for real.
The inability of people unable to intuit what was going on with Trump — I was impressed by it, not repelled. Tell me more about your impression of Trump. What also appalls me is the language of him and his cronies — people talking about sucking on their own cocks and such.
They talk like out-of-control 6-year-olds. I was thinking yesterday about a Chinese blessing. Can you guess which one? May you live in interesting times? The blessing is to live in un interesting times. Where I grew up, in Weston-super-Mare, our life was very proper and middle class.
So the counterculture was very much counter to my culture. I never read Jack Kerouac or anyone like that. I did find, though, that on the West Coast of America there were a lot of people who, like myself, do not like the materialist reductionist view of the world. Yeah, there were a lot of people that thought we were on pot when we were writing. Were you? No, and the suggestion vaguely irritated me.
It requires more thought than that. Does a different kind of person prefer Fawlty Towers to Monty Python? There are so few comedic similarities between the two. The thing about Fawlty Towers is that almost anyone can understand the comedy of it.
A child of 8 can follow everything in it. The emotion in Fawlty Towers is so much more acute, though. People get embarrassed when they watch Fawlty Towers.
I was in a therapy group once with a judge; when he joined the group he had no idea who I was. The vicarious embarrassment was too much for him. I thought that was just perfectly funny. I think as you go along with therapy, you gain insight into yourself, hopefully, and also into other people, and you begin to see that there are better ways of handling both yourself and of handling other people. Has being in therapy for so many years affected your work? I had a very friendly argument about a year or two ago with [Terry] Gilliam, because he felt that becoming more self-aware made you less creative.
I said no, it makes you more creative but less productive.
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