Just a silly little comeback

HERE is the Oxford English Dictionary on the word “Pythonesque”: “After the style of, or resembling the humor of, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a popular British television comedy series that first ran from 1969 to 1974 and is noted for its absurdist or surrealist humor.” Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English defines it more particularly as “pertaining to something that is fast-paced, surreal, and following stream-of-consciousness.”

Both definitions leave out “silliness,” which is perhaps the series’ essential quality; maybe “silliness” is too silly a word for a respectable major dictionary. (And there’s no mention of the movies, record albums, books, souvenir mugs or action figures.)

Still, it’s testimony to the lasting effect of the troupe that became known as Monty Python, after the title of their show, and more familiarly the Pythons. The group has also inspired a “Jeopardy” category -- perhaps as good an indicator of relevance as the OED -- and a beer, “Monty Python’s Holy Grail Ale” (“tempered over burning witches”). A prehistoric species of snake (Montypythonoides riversleighensis) has been named for it, as well as a computer programming language. “Spamalot,” the musical version of the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” has won three Tonys and a Grammy Award, raising the Python profile to renewed heights.

Now, the Pythons return to their spiritual American home, the Public Broadcasting Service, where the “Flying Circus” first aired, beginning on Dallas’ KERA in 1974. Beginning Wednesday and for the two Wednesdays after, PBS presents “Monty Python’s Personal Best,” a six-part series that accords an hour each to its six founding members -- John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam and the now very late Graham Chapman, who died in 1989. The big news about these shows is that they contain new material -- not exactly new Python material -- since each of the five surviving members curates, directs and hosts his own “Personal Best” and contributes from a remote location to the Chapman episode, a straightforward memorial documentary interspersed with sketches.

The group has come together a few times over the last decade, most notably for a 1998 appearance at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, where Chapman was represented by an urn, which Gilliam knocked over in the middle of things, spilling his reputed ashes across the stage. The following year a 30th anniversary program on BBC2 (available on DVD as “The Life of Python”) featured new sketches with most of the surviving members. (Idle weighed in remotely from California). More substantial reunions -- a stage tour, a “Holy Grail” sequel -- were bruited but shot down by one Python or another.

And so, although the new framing material ranges from very funny to not so very funny and the perpetrators have grown strangely older, anything that smacks of fresh Monty Python -- even in this fragmented, alienated form -- is going to be of interest to some, and we know who we are.

Not surprisingly, some of the members take a revisionist tack: As iconoclasts who’ve become icons, they target themselves, or at least one another. (Not even sparing Chapman: “Half the time he was dead drunk; then he stopped being drunk and started being dead,” says Cleese, who plays himself as a cantankerous wheelchair-bound 96-year-old with a chipmunk overbite.)

Dressed in his reporter’s trench coat, Idle reports from the Hollywood Bowl, where the Pythons appeared live in 1980, and also plays his mother and what might be called an escaped Nazi humorist. Palin (in pith hat and mustache) checks in from Teddington Lock, where the Fish Slapping Dance -- pretty much what it sounds like -- was filmed. That sequence appears in each of the six compilations but is short. Gilliam devotes his hour to his cutout animations, more than reversing the original series’ ratio of live action to cartoon. (He claims the other boys took the show away from him.) And Jones takes credit for the whole thing: “When I created ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ in 1964, I conceived it primarily as a showcase of my own talents. Monty Python is of course, an anagram of Terry Jones.”

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A resurrection stateside

THE series took off in the States just as it was drawing to a close in England -- by summer 1975 it was being carried on 130 PBS stations, more or less beginning public broadcasting’s profitable affair with British comedy. (It was American interest that kept the BBC from wiping the tapes for reuse, as was its policy for comedy shows.) But I was aware of them before that through “Another Monty Python Record,” released here in 1971 and containing such classic skits as “The Spanish Inquisition,” which nobody expects; “Spam”; and the cannibalism medley of “Still No Sign of Land (Lifeboat)” and “Undertaker.” (“Fred! I think we’ve got an eater!”)

The humor was strange, smart, surreal, free-associative and ghastly, and it mixed the high with the low, the deep with the trivial. Inspired by Spike Milligan’s anarchic “Q5,” which preceded Python onto the air, punch lines and endings were done away with in favor of sudden cutaways. (“And now for something completely different.”)

The Pythons, when we finally saw them on television, a year before “Saturday Night Live” debuted, were young, long(ish)-haired, and anti-Establishment, not in a strictly political sense but in the sense that anyone foolish enough to think himself “established” needed to be disabused of it. At the same time, their humor was not exactly social criticism. (And despite the time, it was definitely not hippie humor.) The attack was more fundamental, directed toward reality itself, eternally unstable in a world understood by something as treacherous as language. That’s what’s kept Python fresh and brought in new followers generation after generation.

All comedy is subversive -- the simplest schoolyard joke works by frustrating expectations, by zigging left instead of zagging right, by coming to the fork in the road and taking it. The Pythons wear their Oxbridge educations on their sleeves -- lots of references to philosophy and literature and world history -- but they revel also in silliness, in sideways logic.

“There’s a man at the door with a mustache.”

“Tell him I already got one.”

Or:

“I just spent four hours burying the cat.”

“Four hours to bury a cat?”

“Yes -- it wouldn’t keep still.”

One thing doesn’t necessarily follow from the last here. (“Exclusively on the program today we have the foreign secretary, who has just returned from the bitter fighting in the Gulf of Amman. He’s going to tell us about canoeing.”) As in Lewis Carroll or the Marx Brothers, language gets slippery or breaks down altogether: A man spells his name Raymond Luxury Yacht but pronounces it Throatwobbler Mangrove. A deceptive Hungarian English phrasebook translates asking for a match as “My hovercraft is full of eels.” (It’s a measure of the Python’s influence that this phrase gets 46,200 hits on Google.)

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Relishing the ridiculous

THE word “silly” appears often in the Python canon -- there are the Ministry of Silly Walks, the Silly Olympics, the election race between the Sensible and the Silly parties. In “The Holy Grail,” King Arthur decides to bypass Camelot because “it is a silly place.”

But everywhere is silly in Pythonland, where we meet a man with three buttocks, a man with a tape recorder up his nose, a cat suffering from “suburban fin de siecle ennui,” and witness a women’s club reenacting Pearl Harbor, a wrestling match to decide the existence of God, “A Tale of Two Cities” adapted for parrots, the semaphore version of “Wuthering Heights,” the AllEngland Summarize Proust Competition, a cheese shop uncontaminated by cheese; and apartment towers built by hypnotism.

Silliness is not, of course, to everyone’s taste -- indeed, one of Python’s primary targets is people who have no time for it. “Nobody likes a good laugh more than I do,” declares Chapman’s recurring Colonel character. “Except perhaps my wife. And some of her friends. Oh, yes, and Capt. Johnson. Come to think of it, most people like a good laugh more than I do.” The Colonel is in the habit of peremptorily ending sketches with such declarations as: “Stop this. This is getting very silly now.”

But in a world where fatal absurdities are mouthed and perpetrated by nominally intelligent people, silliness can seem positively sensible. And so welcome back, Pythons.