This week -- technically yesterday, and then only if I get this published by 11:59 p.m. Eastern, and it's actually already two days ago in Britain -- marks the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of Monty Python's Flying Circus on BBC One. It seems to have been roundly celebrated everywhere but in a story or diary here, and that cannot stand. So here's a memoir of Monty Python and me, to be followed, I hope, by your own memoirs of Monty Python and you, as well as some delicious videos if you're so disposed. (And no doubt you are.)
My first exposure to Monty Python was on a broadcast -- of which I cannot verify the existence -- of some special they put together for American primetime television in 1973 or so, I believe just before I was to enter high school. I remember two things about it: being puzzled by the impenetrable British accents, and John Cleese, in what I think was probably his "Gumby" character, screaming out "BEANS" repeatedly as said legume slopped and flew around what may have been a living room set. It was not a success, I can't find reference to it, as unless I misremember my own personal history I was too young to be hallucinating it. Perhaps one of you, too, was watching that night.
It wasn't long, though, before my older friends from high school ushered me into the school library where one could bring an album and have four people listen to it simultaneously through headphones. (This, 35 years ago, was Technology!) Someone -- I forget whom -- brought their Monty Python records and we who were newly being exposed to them were reduced to screaming and crying in no time. The librarian, a septuagenarian (I'm guessing) named Gladys, came over every few minutes to tell us to pipe down, but as we were not troublemakers and were clearly only tenuously holding onto our bodily functions, she would let us pass. I'd like to think that perhaps we influenced her to try some of the hard stuff herself.
In short order came Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It's still the funniest movie I've seen, and one of the smartest. Or so I remember, from having slipped out of my seat several times and watched some of it from the theater floor.
I was the right age, in the right place with the right disposable income and free time, to make it to see Monty Python at the Hollywood Bowl. I think that John Cleese may have even whizzed by me on the aisle selling an albatross concession, but I was too giddy to form clear permanent memories.
In their work before then and since then, individually and collectively, the Pythons stood for humor with absurdity, intelligence, and humanism, pretty much in that order. Now they exist largely as a marketing machine, a la The Beatles, but as with their musical friends (literally, in Eric Idle and George Harrison's case) what they are selling to new generations is worth buying. Exposing young adolescents to the corruptions of Pythonalia is one of the pleasures of growing older; the trick is how to make it seem like something forbidden, so that they will decide to see if they enjoy it.
The top-rated article on the New York Times website right now is, appropriately enough, entitled "How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect." Oh, indeed. It certainly worked for me and countless others who grew up and gorged on Monty Python, segueing from life's instruction in Argumentation (which is not the automatic gainsay of ...) to Getting Hit on the Head Lessons, and I hope that the lessons that Python has to teach never go out of style.
Of course, no diary on Monty Python could be complete without a flood of catchphrases, but -- except for the one with which I entitled this diary, which I will explain if necessary -- I leave those to you.