On board with a comic master

When Monty Python alumnus Eric Idle set off on a road trip across North America, he began a diary about the experience of performing nearly 50 gigs over three months -- some musical comedy, some stand-up comedy, the latter of which is new terrain for Idle. A few comedian friends joined him on the more-than-80-day bus tour, serving as his hapless foils and sidekicks. “The Greedy Bastard Diary” is also a road trip through Idle’s strange, irreverent and witty mind, as he offers reflections on Monty Python, on comedy and on an unhappy childhood.

To be sure, there is plenty of filler in Idle’s book, which is essentially a blog on paper. He includes the most quotidian details, such as being upgraded at the Radisson Hotel in Burlington, Vt., “into a business class room that overlooks Lake Champlain, so now I have a spectacular business class view.” Still, Idle is easily charming enough to sustain reader interest. He describes being irked about “fielding endless Monty Python questions” from journalists; in his diary, he provides a list of questions he suggests should be verboten when interviewing any of the Pythons: “How did you get together?” “What is your favorite sketch?” and “Will you ever get back together again?”

Idle’s road ruminations are exceedingly droll. In Montreal, he ponders the French. “It’s true, I do like the French,” he writes. “I like their Frenchness. I like their language; I like their style; I like the way they have of living their lives through their senses, paying attention to the important things like food, clothing, sexuality, wine, and even movies.” In Boston, he reports that because his confused bus driver can’t find his way out of Logan airport, he has returned to the car park to start over. Idle wonders if the Byzantine layout of the airport isn’t some sort of deliberate homeland security thing, to trap potential terrorists.

It’s a given that Idle’s book would be funny, but most compelling are his thoughts on the process of comedy and on his peers. Of the Scottish comic Billy Connolly, Idle writes, “He always talks the same, whether his audience is one or one thousand. It’s a form of exterior monologue. He’s like a man constantly querying reality, endlessly reflecting on what is unfurling in front of him.” Remarking affectionately on the ever-improvising Eddie Izzard, Idle writes, “He talks in paragraphs of subject, and these can extend or shrink or swap position depending on his mood.”

Idle’s greatest awe is reserved for Robin Williams, whom he considers a genius. “Trying to do comedy alongside Robin is like trying to solve a math problem alongside Einstein: you’re lucky to be in the same room,” he writes, adding that Williams “is so fast you never really know when he has slipped into pure inspiration.... No one is faster than him. He is faster than the speed of thought.”

About his own comic gifts, Idle is far too humble throughout.

He doesn’t venture much into his personal life, but when he does, witty gems abound. Recalling that after his first marriage ended, he went off to Australia, Idle writes, “It’s where English people go to have emotions.” Describing his second marriage, which has lasted 26 years, he considers himself “a happily married man -- if that’s not an oxymoron.”

In the few passages in which “Greedy Bastard” enters into somewhat sober terrain, Idle keeps things brief, as in writing on the death of his mother. And in a section recalling his difficult boyhood, he refers to himself only in the third person. (Well, he is English, after all.)

Idle acknowledges becoming a comedian for the usual reasons: to avoid bullying and win friends. He used bitter humor as a coping mechanism and survival skill. Idle found his way at Cambridge University, serendipitously meeting John Cleese, joining the famed Footlights comedic troupe and eventually forming the legendary Pythons, along with Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman and Terry Gilliam.

Like all talented comedians, Idle makes it appear all too easy. He cloaks himself in self-deprecation and playful ignorance throughout “Greedy Bastard.” Yet he makes enough references to books to seem obviously well-read. (Virginia Woolf, J.M. Coetzee and Martin Amis are among the luminaries mentioned, as well as E.M. Forster, whom Idle says he once spotted walking across campus at Cambridge.)

By the time his bus rolls into Los Angeles, his adopted hometown and the final stop of his tour, Idle proves himself a wry, adroit observer of American life -- not unlike the great Bill Bryson, only more twisted in his sensibility, and even more hilarious.

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Carmela Ciuraru is a regular contributor to Book Review.