Still able to bust a gut

“Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life,” the last film starring the seminal British comedy troupe of John Cleese, the late Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin, has some of the grossest -- and to some fans, funniest -- sketches ever on screen. For pure outrageousness it’s hard to beat the musical number “Every Sperm Is Sacred,” a wicked satire about a destitute Catholic couple who must sell their 60-plus children for medical experiments to pay bills, or the saga of Mr. Creosote, a grotesquely overweight patron of a fancy restaurant who turns the eatery into a vomitorium before he explodes from excessive gluttony.

It’s not the kind of movie that you would think would win the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, but that’s exactly what happened 20 years ago. “Once we got to Creosote and the food and the vomiting, the French just went nuts,” Idle recalls. “They laughed and laughed and laughed. Orson Welles was on the jury that year. It was a wonderful experience to be there and feel it really work.”

Ironically, Cleese has never been particularly fond of “Meaning of Life,” which Universal recently released for its 20th anniversary in a deliciously funny two-disc DVD set ($27) that features audio commentary, new prologues and sketches, and a comprehensive retrospective documentary.

“It’s a sketch film,” says Cleese, adding that the average attention span of a movie audience for a sketch film is no more than 50 minutes. Still, he says, “the last time I saw it, when I screened it for a charity event, I liked it better than I remembered. I thought there were some really good things in it. It just has all the faults of a sketch movie. In an ordinary movie, provided the story is good, you can have five or six really funny scenes and nobody minds the scenes that aren’t funny because they are part of the story. But when you are doing a sketch movie, every single scene has to be funny or else it looks like an anticlimax.”

Cleese goes so far as to say he became a “bit depressed” during the production of “Meaning of Life.”

“I have to say I never much ever enjoyed the filmmaking process,” he explains. “It never really appealed to me. I don’t think I love it enough. When you do a film, it’s a tiny bit like going off to war. There is a high degree of boredom and repetition, and you can get really anxious about things. It doesn’t suit my temperament.”

The whole “Meaning of Life” experience, from planning to writing to filming, wasn’t satisfying to him because “it came out such a dog’s breakfast. I also had the experience of seeing stuff in the movie I hadn’t voted for. I thought at this grand old age -- I was 44 -- I should be doing things where I am really making my mistakes rather than making other people’s. That is one of the things that led me to ‘A Fish Called Wanda,’ which was five years later. I work slowly.”

Idle disagrees with Cleese. “He was never really present all the way through [the production]. And he’s wonderful in this. I think it was a stage in his life when he was no longer happy to be in a group. He was persuaded into it by a business manager for all the wrong reasons.”

Idle does have his own particular “beef and bug” about the film, which was directed by Jones and features an inventive prologue directed by Gilliam. “Once I came up with the concept of the meaning of life and we kind of got with the idea and the title, it needed a whole other rewrite to make it also about the seven ages of man. So the one story would go through time. That was very close to being done, but John wouldn’t do any more writing. So it’s his fault! I can entirely blame him.”

But what Idle admires most about the movie is that “it’s still offensive.”

Perhaps too offensive for American audiences. Though the film won over the crowd at Cannes, it received mixed reviews stateside. “It really shocked here,” says Idle.

“Meaning of Life” is the only Python film made by a major studio. “We refused to give them a script because we said, how can you tell us how to write a Monty Python film,” says Idle. “All we gave them was a 12-line poem and a budget, and they greenlit it on that. The only drawback is that it’s still not in profit. It cost $9 million and it has taken in over $30 million, and it’s still not in profit.

“It’s the only film we don’t own or have money from. I think Universal ought to wear no shoes for a week!”

The Pythons all agreed to become involved in the “Meaning of Life” DVD after a separate deal was struck. “This is a separate revenue stream,” says Idle. “Otherwise we wouldn’t do it. That’s what we said to them.”

Despite his misgivings about the film, Cleese had a good time participating in the extras for the DVD. “I was actually terribly pleased to get a couple of sketches that Michael had written,” he says. “They made me laugh, and I thought it would be fun doing this. I hardly do that stuff anymore. We [the Pythons] have occasionally done things together in the last few years, and it’s very nice to do now and again.”