Killer Joke Triumphs

At least 2 million Americans are now aware of the Ministry of Silly Walks. College students are finding new meanings for the word stupid, and old ladies may even be getting ideas about beating up kids. What is this pernicious influence, bordering on a cult, that is now sweeping the U.S.? The word is Monty Python. Five roopy young Englishmen, who methodically take the world apart each week in a series of sketches mysteriously called Monty Python 's Flying Circus, have conquered the U.S. air waves. The Pythons are getting the kind of following that a presidential candidate might envy. They are the hottest TV import; 78 public-television stations are now committed to run the show, which is one of the most popular in public TV history. Doubtless there will be many more as their new movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (see box), is released across the nation. The flick has already opened in Manhattan, where on the first days, crowds lined up four deep around a city block. Said the Pythons' U.S. manager Nancy Lewis: "And they thought no one would understand them here."

Real People. Whether or not Americans actually do understand the Pythons' uniquely English nonsense is moot. Their comedy is crowded with jokes about British TV announcers and politicians; their best sketches are intimate parodies of the idiocies of British life. Moreover, their style is the opposite of hard-hitting American humor. The Pythons can hardly summon a wisecrack among them. However, Program Director Ron Devillier of KERA in Dallas knows what endears them to Americans: "They have a nice sense of sex." Says a Philadelphia insurance broker: "They're the only real people on television."

This verdict would delight the Pythons. They have done their best to remove themselves from boring reality and construct something far more pleasurable. It was in a London pub in 1969 that John Cleese and Graham Chapman, gagwriters for the Frost Report, teamed up with Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Eric Idle, similarly disaffected writers from Britain's then booming satire business. They decided to start their own program. The BBC did not balk when told that the show would be "anarchic and free." Recalls Cleese: "They thought they were getting another latenight satire show. It wasn't that at all." Constantly testing sketches on one another, the Pythons were bent on turning English literary and verbal humor into a series of sight gags. They soon enlisted a new recruit, Minnesota-born Terry Gilliam, whose animated graphics are a favorite device for closing a sketch. "We worked intuitively," explains Cleese of those early days. "We went looking for stupid things. We just wanted to pick a few flowers."

As they gained confidence, the Pythons embarked on ever wilder flights of fancy. Simple moments, such as a karate class being attacked by fresh fruit, grew to sequences like the Killer Joke that caused everyone to die laughing. Ultimately, the Joke was taken over by the War Office and launched against the Nazis in the Ardennes. Another Python classic was the case of the listless cat. "In a rut," declared its owners, who thereupon called in the Confuse-A-Cat team, men in white coats who stage a full-scale military review. The cat watches without twitching a whisker. Then it suddenly goes crazy.

Ad Lib. Monty Python soon became a huge award-winning hit. Four records were issued, books of Python jokes were published, and in 1972 the best TV sketches were stitched into the movie And Now for Something Completely Different. By last spring, when the group went to Scotland for Holy Grail, the Python no-formula rule had become a formula itself. "Everyone assumes this stuff is ad lib," says Grail Producer Mark For-stater. "But the Pythons are like a rock group with the performance planned down to the last minute."

Programmed spontaneity has not, however, sobered the Pythons. After Jones, who is also writing a book about Chaucer, had researched the Arthurian legend, everyone had a go at embellishing it. Together they ripped apart the lily maid of Astolat ("just because a watery tart threw a sword at you"), and Idle introduced a new Round Table knight, Sir Robin the Chickenhearted, who is dogged by literal-minded minstrels who hymn his cowardice.

A Flying Circus series new to the U.S. will be aired in the fall, culled from the repeats that have been running in England since 1972. Recently, the Pythons have struck out on their own. Cleese is working on a show "about a rude and bad-tempered hotelkeeper who cannot cope; it embodies all the bad service in British hotels." Idle has devised Rutland Weekend Television, named after England's smallest county, which vanished in an organizational shuffle last year. But when the Pythons arrived in New York City to promote Holy Grail, they were so entranced by the natives who actually recognized them individually that they agreed to everything--a new movie, another record and, as a public service, a nationwide stage tour next spring that may make Woodstock look like a church social.

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