Monty Python's Flying Circus

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Jeffrey S. Miller

That a British comedy series dealing with, among other things, the Upper-Class Twit of the Year Contest, the Ministry of Silly Walks, and a public Argument Clinic would become a cultural phenomenon in the United States during the 1970s was, as comedian Eric Idle said, the last thing in the world one would expect. Nonetheless, Monty Python's Flying Circus, the show Idle helped create, became a significant part of American culture in the years immediately following the Watergate scandal, creating a large cult following among young, college-educated viewers and influencing American comedy and television for decades to come.

The roots of Monty Python's Flying Circus can be found in the satirical comedy boom occurring in both America and Britain during the late 1950s and early 1960s. While satire in the States was the province of nightclub comics and a few improvisatory workshops, in Britain it was centered at the Oxbridge hub of higher education. The Cambridge Footlights Club and similar groups at Oxford entertained both their university communities and theatregoers around the nation with revues of topical sketches, impersonations, and song parodies. Oxbridge satire made its way to British television in 1962, with the BBC's (British Broadcasting Corporation) That Was the Week That Was (TW3). Featuring a number of revue veterans, including interlocutor David Frost, TW3 offered a weekly collection of topical skits, songs, and interviews presented in a bare-bones open studio that allowed viewers to see the mechanics of the show's production as it was going on. Though phenomenally popular, the show's barbed humor quickly ran afoul of both the Tory government and the BBC, which canceled the series at the end of 1963 in order to avoid political problems with upcoming elections. After a failed effort to revisit the TW3 format, Frost called on his Oxbridge connections to staff his 1966 BBC show, The Frost Report. John Cleese and Graham Chapman had written and performed for Footlights Club shows and tours, including one that played in New York in 1964. Eric Idle had followed Cleese and Chapman to Cambridge, where he became familiar to Frost. Terry Jones and Michael Palin, meanwhile, were working in various Oxford revues offering a more zany, absurdist humor than the topical sketches of the Footlights Club. Their work together on The Frost Report began a series of working relationships that culminated in 1969, when they rejoined as a group for a BBC series that would come to have a global effect on television comedy.

The first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, broadcast on October 5, 1969, featured sketches including a television show devoted to famous deaths, a parody of a BBC interview show, and a documentary on the weapon that won World War II: the funniest joke ever told. The sketches were interspersed with cut-out animation created by Minneapolis-born artist Terry Gilliam, with whom John Cleese had worked during his time in New York. The remaining 12 shows in the first Python series continued to develop the group's comedic style, one that was far less satiric, in terms of addressing topical issues and figures, than it was absurd, but one that was also relentlessly and at times viciously anti-authoritarian. Sketches that hilariously overturned familiar norms--a transvestite lumberjack, a pet shop owner who sells dead parrots--were joined with increasing frequency by comic attacks on the British government, the military, the Church of England, the landed aristocracy, and the legal, medical, and business communities. No institution was more ridiculed, however, than the television industry itself, both in numerous parodies of individual programs and genres and in the group's self-reflexive dismantlings of production conventions: the intrusion of opening and often phony closing credits at inappropriate places, the sudden appearance of "BBC officials" to comment on or complain about the show, the shortening of sketches by characters who decide that they are not funny.

Despite regional scheduling difficulties, the first series of Monty Python's Flying Circus attracted a substantial late-night audience, strong critical praise, and a firm BBC commitment for more shows. A second series of 13 episodes ran in fall 1970, and a third series was broadcast in winter 1971-1972. Meanwhile, word of the show was beginning to spread beyond its homeland. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation picked up the first series in 1970, making it available to American viewers near the border. The troupe turned a number of sketches from the first series into an eponymous record album in 1970, followed by three more albums in 1971 through 1973. Copies of the albums, as well as collections of Python material in book form, began to make their way into the United States during the early 1970s. Sketches from the first two series of the show were collected in a film, And Now, For Something Completely Different, that was released, to less than overwhelming results, in 1972. The group itself, touring Canada to take advantage of its popularity there, even went to Los Angeles to make an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1973. Immediately afterward, however, John Cleese left the troupe. The remaining members went on to produce one more six-episode series for the BBC in fall 1974, which seemed to be the final voyage for Monty Python's Flying Circus.