Monty Python
Monty Python's Flying Circus

There's a man running.

He looks like a perfect tramp who lacks the resources to afford anything more dignified than a greasy shirt, a makeshift vest, and trousers torn from the knee down, but upon closely examining the clumsy and lanky stride in his mad dash, it might be inferred that the long beard is likely that of a hermit who has chosen to live in the forest of Cheshire or the wild Cornish countryside, perpetually pursued or threatened by some dark force that compels him to wander aimlessly. But his run actually seems directed towards a goal: in a few moments, he is ever closer to our eyes and before you know it, he presents himself with his wrinkled face and unkempt tuft in front of the screen, apparently able to preserve the last breath to deliver us a prophetic announcement. He is about to speak. What will he say? Could it be a revelation or a warning for future generations? A little hesitation and then, in a surreal silence, his words: "It's". Just less than two full words, a linguistic paradox that with such a solemn buildup seems to be the tool of someone wanting to play a joke on the spectator waiting for at least a prophecy about the near future. But that "It's," in reality, is the solemn beginning of one of the most brilliant orchestral performances in the history of comedy, being the precise incipit of the episodes of the series Monty Python's Flying Circus which had the fortune to delight for over a lustrum (1969-1974) the discerning English audience known for its humor full of sarcastic veins. Hearing that monosyllable whispered by this supposed tramp, often after a run filled with stumbles and awkward falls, it's almost natural to betray a smile out of an ancestral sense of solidarity towards this poor devil who seems the predestined victim of an actorly libation where the unluckiest part to snatch some laughter fell to the sacrificial lamb. Pale blue eyes and the kind expression of a docile bullock: it's Michael Palin, the most good-natured and lovable of the six terrible Englishmen who radically revolutionized the history of world comedy. We love Michael for that air of a whipped dog that characterizes all his characters and is a reflection of a genuinely shy and non-overbearing personality. We love him for the awkward shyness that distinguishes Mr. Pither, who finds himself in a long sketch from the third series having to face a firing squad for having accommodated and carried on his bike a mad traveling companion convinced of being the reincarnation of Trotsky. For the occasion of the "42nd International Barbecue," the self-styled Trotsky, played by the great friend and sketch companion Terry Jones, mocks the whole of Russia through an irreverent ballet, and here's good Pither finding himself in no time in front of five rifles pointed at him. After miraculously escaping execution, he falls asleep in the cell and wakes up sitting in the home garden with his mother - a hilarious female version of Eric Idle - taking care of him.

"Come on, dear, wake up, dear!"
"Mama!"
"Come on, dear!"
"So... it was all a dream!"
"No, dear... this is the dream: you are still in the cell!"

Curtain.

There's the dining room of a three-star restaurant.

A man (Graham Chapman) and a woman (Carol Cleveland) sit happily at a table waiting to order. A waiter with an affected French accent (Terry Jones) appears and advises the two patrons about the house specialties and, upon retrieving the menus, is informed by the customer of a dirty fork on the table. From this moment on, everything will grotesquely spiral out of control through a disproportionate amplification of the incident, first forcing the head waiter (Michael Palin), the manager (Eric Idle), and the cook (John Cleese) to appear on stage to apologize for what happened. It all ends with the sudden death of the head waiter due to a recurring head war wound, the seppuku of the manager with the incriminated dirty fork embedded in his chest, and the miraculous intervention of the waiter jumping onto the chef just as the latter is about to strike the astonished customers with a cleaver. In this wonderful orchestral performance where all the Monty Python members appear as rarely happens - the only one missing is Terry Gilliam, customarily working behind the scenes on his art work - there is all the poetics of the masks impersonated by the talented English cabaret artists, considering Palin's usual subservience, starting to insult the "disgusting" fork in front of the diners to express his embarrassment, and Eric Idle's customary showmanship as the manager, wearing an elegant dark suit, cufflink shirt, and pocket square while using refined and seductive speech explaining the backstage of a problematic management to the two hapless patrons before abandoning himself to a delirious cry for the unfortunate fork incident. And then there's John Cleese, perhaps the most famous of the six Englishmen for his appearances in films outside the Python world (memorable is his role as attorney Archie Leach in "A Fish Called Wanda"), seamlessly fitting into the part of a bad lieutenant ready to use weapons against those who, in his view, play the part of the "dissident." Here he is as chef Mungo, in a memorable entrance scene where he yells, "You, bastards!" at Chapman and his partner, guilty, in his view, of humiliating the poor Idle in the throes of desperate sobbing. That cleaver thrown on the table is the leitmotif of his often violent and authoritarian characters (in another memorable episode of the first series, he demonstrates "self-defense against fresh fruit" by shooting the unwitting Chapman while the latter assaults him armed with a banana), a reflection, in a perfect symbiosis between art and life, of a often rigid and uncompromising character, so much so that he left the successful Flying Circus series at the end of the third season believing the group's creative vein inevitably exhausted: the truncated fourth season, with only six episodes, will severely suffer from the absence of his sarcastic and irreverent characters. His counterpart is patron Graham Chapman, the friend and co-writer of sketches like Terry Jones is to Michael Palin, at ease in the role of a phlegmatic customer trying to pour cold water on the fire inadvertently ignited by the complaints about the dirty fork, a perfect half of a pair that could not be better matched: punctilious and authoritarian Cleese, extravagant and inclined to vice (of drinking) Chapman. The scripts Cleese wrote for sketches, generally well-structured and already funny, were revised by Chapman to give that eccentric and often grotesque component that precipitates events in a crescendo of surreal comedy. A perfect mix. Graham delivers the last memorable line of the restaurant sketch, when all the other characters now lie lifeless on the ground:

"Luckily we didn’t say anything about the dirty knife!”

It’s the notorious "punch line," the final line required in all comedy sketches from yesterday to today. Cleese considered it an unbearable ploy, and not coincidentally in this sketch, making its first and last appearance, it is highlighted through a disclaimer announcing its arrival and is duly mocked by a fake audience who disapproves of its use.

In reality, even in the paroxysm that marks this coup de théâtre, the Monty Python hit the mark, evoking the loudest laughter.

There's a small can of Spam.

Canned Spam was the major source of nourishment for Allied soldiers during World War II. Created by the American company Hormel in 1937, it was a preparation of mixed chicken and pork meat with high protein content, perfect for a quick meal that required no form of cooking. In an episode of Flying Circus season 2, here comes a couple of gentlemen—truthfully, lowered from above as if they were puppets—into a strange establishment populated by euphoric Vikings and governed by a querulous barmaid with heavy makeup. The two patrons, Graham Chapman in a wig and lipstick as the wife and Eric Idle with a hat and black jacket as the husband, inquire about the menu. In response, the grating bartender, played by an over-the-top Jones, bursts into reading a series of dishes, all inevitably containing the fateful Spam in quantities suggesting abundant and paradoxical use:

"Egg and bacon
Egg, sausage, and bacon
Egg and Spam
Egg, bacon, and Spam
Egg, bacon, sausage, and Spam
Spam, bacon, sausage, and Spam
Spam, egg, Spam, Spam, bacon, and Spam
Spam, Spam, Spam, egg, and Spam
Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, baked beans, Spam, Spam, Spam, and Spam
Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce, garnished with truffle pâté, brandy and a fried egg on top, and Spam."

The elderly lady at the table is annoyed and seeks a dish without Spam, but when she asks if she can have “egg, bacon, Spam, and sausage without Spam,” she is rebuffed with disgust by the barkeeper who denies her the option of removing the Spam from the dish. Idle soothes the wife, saying he will eat the Spam left by his lady and will, for his part, take a dish of “Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, baked beans, Spam, Spam, Spam, and Spam.” The sketch concludes with the Vikings’ euphoric chanting of praise to Spam and a dazed Cleese entering the scene babbling words in unclear English and also contributing to the Spam chant with another list of dishes based on the fateful high-protein canned meat.

Indeed, it is a fact that the origin of the contemporary term "Spam" to designate unwanted email stems from this brief and brilliant Monty Python sketch: the repetitiveness of the dish in all the menu offerings of the quirky Viking-frequented diner transforms Spam into an unwanted and annoying item, despite the desperate attempts of the aged lady at the table to obtain something that does not contain the omnipresent high-protein canned meat. When a group of artists' cultural influence transcends the confines of their own field, it's inevitable to think that their work has merits that go beyond the primary purpose for which their art exists and is passed down to posterity. In this fantastic style exercise, the Monty Python were unwitting onomatologists to the extent that they invented the term "Spam" with the meaning that we all know today referred to in the telecommunications world, and they deserve to be in the Empyreum where artists who clothed themselves with the same merit of shaping language as Shakespeare, D’Annunzio, and Federico Fellini reside. Like Prometheus, they stole fire from the gods to give it to humankind, but unlike the illustrious son of Iapetus, when Zeus sets out to punish them with the intention of chaining them to a rock, they flee amidst shouts and derision, as no immanent or transcendent force can extinguish the sacred fire of irreverence that lives within them.

There’s a foot.

Of enormous dimensions and anything but a sinuous line, it is destined to crush, inexorably, the lively animations of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus opening credits with a sacrilegious momentum evoking the destructive ambitions of the English group’s comedy. Always the same and consistently present in every season, practically a trademark of the Pythons so much that it became perhaps the most famous sphragis of the six terrible Englishmen. That monstrous foot with the stubby curve is not the original creation of an animator with a marked fetishistic sensitivity but a learned and brilliant loan from the dazzling “Allegory of the Triumph of Venus” by Bronzino, where the extremity of the limb belongs to a lustful Cupid intent on teasing the snow-white bosom of the goddess of love. There is, in this ingenious transposition, an intent to reposition art in a context where high and low exchange roles, creating an aesthetic short circuit in which the sinuous beauty of intertwined bodies of a Mannerist masterpiece, mutilated and delocalized in the grotesque and irreverent realm of Pythonian animations, transforms into a vulgar and trivial press crushing everything, evoking the sound of a sluggish raspberry. The deus ex machina is Terry Gilliam, the "Invisible Monty Python" who mainly distinguished himself for his role as director (his was the direction of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” together with Terry Jones and many other famous films with or without the English companions) and cartoonist of the Flying Circus openings and interludes. Gilliam is the only group member born in the USA but English by adoption after the many years spent in the United Kingdom alongside the Pythons, and this peculiarity seems almost to determine a necessary differentiation from Chapman, Cleese, Idle, Jones, and Palin, the proverbial English humor being an innate quality not easily passed on from subject to subject and hence physiologically distant from the American-born cartoonist. Therefore, Gilliam's destiny is a different but equally important job, and while acting skills don’t place him on par with other Pythons (his appearances in Flying Circus sketches are extremely rare), he shares with his English colleagues a precious quality that elevates his art as a cartoonist: a profound and refined culture of ancient and modern arts. This explains why that enormous destructive foot owes its origins to Bronzino and why precious Victorian photographs punctually parade in Gilliam's cartoons intermingled with surreal animated versions of famous works of art like Botticelli’s "The Birth of Venus" and Rodin’s "The Thinker”. Through the power of a visual language that blends original animations with images taken from reality, Terry Gilliam managed, just like his educated playmates sons of Albion, to achieve the enviable feat of generating comedy through the artifice of culture.

There’s a funeral commemoration.

It’s December 3, 1989, and the Monty Python are gathered to commemorate the loss of their friend Graham Chapman, who died just two months earlier from the unfortunate outcome of throat cancer. The atmosphere is tinged with soft melancholy, with the Pythons still unable to fully process the grief for the young colleague and friend who died at only 48 years old, but aware they must pass on a memory that, perfectly in tune with their famous laid-back style, doesn’t indulge in laments and self-pity. Thus John Cleese first, then Michael Palin later, remember Graham with tender light-heartedness, coaxing a few laughs from the audience of family and friends gathered at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. Their eulogies are full of witty and flattering words for the companion of countless sketches, and the moment when Cleese confesses to having received a dream appearance of Chapman himself who allegedly asked him to be the first to say the word "fuck" in a British eulogy is particularly hilarious. The audience appreciates this and quietly laughs. Eric Idle is the last to speak: after letting the other Pythons and other friends and acquaintances of Chapman come onstage, he returns with mind and voice to ten years earlier, when in the role of a down-and-out thief he had to console friend Graham, in the guise of young Jewish Brian Cohen mistakenly identified as Jesus and therefore punished by crucifixion in the famous “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” directed by Terry Jones, reminding him always to banish the worst moments of life by whistling a tune. Together with the friends who came on stage, he starts singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life."

"Life's a piece of shit
When you look at it
Life's a laugh and death's a joke, it's true
You'll see it's all a show
Keep 'em laughin' as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you
And always look on the bright side of life
Always look on the right side of life"

Idle’s performance with the other Pythons now takes on, ten years after the grotesque and hilarious fiasco that was "Life of Brian," the semblance of a friendly and moving farewell to the friend who is no more. The memorial concludes with Idle's last sacrilegious words, claiming the right to be, after Cleese, "the last person in this meeting to say 'fuck.'"

From that day in December 1989, more than thirty years have passed, and the Pythons have experienced another painful loss in 2020, that of Terry Jones, following a rare neurological disease. Probably, if their now advanced ages had allowed it, the four surviving Englishmen would have honored the lost friend through another memorable funeral commemoration. And they would have done it in the same style. Yes, because today as back then, noticing the eternal carnival spirit of these six great English artists, the most natural reflection can only be this: despite the stubborn quest for the mysterious "Meaning of life" on which the Monty Python pondered during their artistic life, going so far as to dedicate an entire film to it, perhaps the meaning of life is right there, in realizing that there is no meaning if life is a beautiful shit, but even on the day someone will come to celebrate your funeral, "always look on the bright side of life."