The essence of Python: six men and silly facial expressions

“Ti tum ti-tiddly-yip ti-tum, ti-tum ti-tum ti-tumm, di dom di-diddly-yip di-dom, di-dom di-dom di-dommmmm…” Hum along now. It’s time for Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
It’s 40 years this October since the first episode took wing on the BBC. And it’s a decade since Terry Jones said, mock-complaining: “One of the things we tried to do with the show was to try and do something that was so unpredictable that it had no shape and you could never say what the kind of humour was. And I think that the fact that ‘Pythonesque’ is now a word in the Oxford English Dictionary shows the extent to which we failed.”

It’s a commonplace to describe Monty Python as “hugely influential,” and it is to that commonplace that Jones addressed himself. But it seems to me plain wrong. Impact and influence are slightly different things, and Python is an object instance of that distinction. I don’t think it was really influential at all.

Though Python, arguably, “made possible” a number of things on television that hadn’t happened before outside radio (their weird textural impasto and odd segues were surely prefigured in The Goon Show), it was the hole they blew in the wall rather than the direction they took through it that made the difference. They were followed, but not widely imitated.

Their near-contemporaries were the influential ones. The influence of Pete and Dud on Smith and Jones and subsequent two-handers seems to me to have been total; and the Fry and Laurie formula spun off (albeit in a surreally arch direction) from the same thing. The influence of Beyond The Fringe on political comedy is far more directly visible: Bremner, Bird and Fortune owes it everything. Similarly, there’s the flavour of Lenny Bruce in Bill Hicks, and Woody Guthrie in early Bob Dylan, and Shelley in early Robert Browning—but there’s the flavour of Python nowhere but in Python.

The word “Pythonesque” does indeed sit, as Jones noted, resplendent in the Oxford English Dictionary, the first citation being a 1975 article in the Guardian. But it is a word in search of a referent: it doesn’t, in the end, describe anything very accurately except Monty Python.

In fact, you could argue that the single most enduringly influential, genre-setting emanation of the Python team has been Michael Palin’s television travelogues. They’re of less historical importance and less artistic interest (smashing though they were) but they spawned a thousand television series starring globetrotting comedians.

It is also almost obligatory in writing about Monty Python’s Flying Circus to notice that a great deal of it now doesn’t work at all. And by God, has it dated. The old shows don’t get repeated that often—the BBC doesn’t seem to be falling over itself to wheel them out for the anniversary—and when they are repeated you realise why they haven’t been.

The (incredibly) funny bits are embedded in acres of stuff that now causes the viewer to scratch his head in bafflement. There was a huge amount of Python—and it wasn’t an unbroken tapestry of parrot, cheese shop, lumberjack, gumbies and Spam.

Imagine, mind you, what an unbroken tapestry of parrot, cheese shop, lumberjack, gumbies and Spam would look like: it would be the sort of thing a Brobdingnagian Terry Gilliam would use as a duvet cover. But I digress.

Even at the time, people were aware the material was uneven. The sharply self-critical mind of Michael Palin certainly did. His diary in June 1980 sees him appraising the upcoming Contractual Obligation album levelly: “One or two of the songs stand out and there are some conventional sketches of Cleese and Chapman’s (man enters shop, etc) which are saved by good performances. Twenty-five per cent padding, fifty per cent quite acceptable, twenty-five per cent good new Python.”

Fawlty Towers—less innovative as it was, and distinctive in its performances but trad in its visual style—was non-stop gold. Python was a mess: but it was a mess from which never-before-seen and unrepeatable glories bobbed to the surface.

My theory is that the shock of Python caused fans and early commentators to assume that its influence would be co-terminous with its impact. So they invented—and should shortly afterwards have mothballed—the neologism. They assumed things would henceforth be Pythonesque—and the term was applied with loose enthusiasm to things that had some of Python’s surrealism. But really the term for those things was “surreal.” And the term for Python—apart from “Pythonesque,” obviously—was “inimitable“ or “sui generis.”

Pace Terry Jones, then, I don’t think they failed at all.

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