Of Budgies and Spain

Except for Will Rogers, comedy seems to follow the same trope that holds for religion--it invariably moves from east to west. New York comics hit the big time and move west to Hollywood, British humor sweeps westward across the Atlantic to the East Coast. Since the Second World War this ageless migration has been performed by Peter Sellers, Beyond the Fringe and most recently, Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Monty Python followed the outlines of the career of Rowan & Martin--a TV-based act that started out strong and, under the pressure of success and the need to produce a show week after week, grew less funny. But so far Americans haven't had to deal with Monty Python in eclipse, when mutilated cat jokes get as predictable as buckets of water. What's available now--four superb records, one incredibly funny movie, and a series of 14 fairly good one-hour TV shows that will be aired on Channel 2 this spring--is vintage Monty Python, which is high praise.

The film is called And Now For Something Completely Different. It is the best touchstone around to discover if you like these people.

Monty Python's Flying Circus is a group effort centered around John Cleese, who, like the rest, is sliced from the Oxbridge fruitcake mold. There are some barriers to enjoying it--Monty Python's humor is based on a parody of British television, and although American TV is close enough for us to know what they're getting at, a lot of this stuff is bound to just pass us by. For some reason that may have to do with cultural heritage or perhaps their educational system, British audiences seem to respond most enthusiastically to jokes about transvestites and mutilated pets. The good routines, though, are universal. They're also impossible to summarize. The best way of convincing you to go laugh at this movie is probably to print an excerpt (but I tried, and it wilted on paper).

The records are of more uneven quality than the movie. The creative, at times even poignant, animation sequences of the film are replaced by music arranged by Neil Innes, once the presiding Bonzo of the Bonzo Dog Band. The music is catchy in its own right, including stirring versions of John Wesley's setting of Blake's "And Did Those Feet," and the original classics "I'm a Lumberjack and I'm OK" (with a chorus of Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the background), "Eric the Half-a-Bee" and "The Lupin Express."

The first Monty Python album (with a big foot crushing a TV screen on the cover) includes the immortal "Dead Parrot" sketch. Unfortunately it's an import and so more expensive than the ordinary record; this is compensated for, though, by the availability of MP's subsequent two albums as $1.99 cut-outs. These are both classics and include the "Argument Clinic," "Budgies," "Spam," "The Undertaker," "The Travel Agent," "How Long is it?" and Karl Marx on a quiz show. Each contains at least one run of five or six superb pieces.

The third album--Matching Tie and Handkerchief--is a let-down, although the Oscar Wilde party and Cheese Shop routines are excellent the first two times around and the Australian University philosophy department drinking song is something which, if you can't exactly dance to it, you can hum:

Immanuel Kant was a real piss-ant

Who was very rarely stable;

'Eidegger, 'Eidegger was a boozy beggar

Who could drink you under the table.

David Hume could out-consume

Good old Friedrich Hegel,

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine

Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.

John Stuart Mill of his own free will,

On half a keg of shandy was particularly ill,

Plato, they say, could stick it away--

Half a pint of whiskey every day.

Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle

And also fond of his dram;

Rene Descartes was a drunken fart

I'll drink to all of them!

The TV shows are worth watching but of very uneven quality. A very funny bit about "historical impersonations" featuring Graham Hill impersonating St. John the Baptist--the moustachioed, goggle-girded head of the racing car driver speeding across stage on top of a silver platter with Indy 500 noises on the soundtrack--can be followed by dismal material about a football team explaining "Why We Love the Yangtze."

Like most contemporary humorists, Monty Python homes in wherever it spots a cliche so rotten it's ready to split open in an explosion of laughter. They take a line like "I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition" and turn it into a six-minute joke when Cardinal Fang bursts in shouting, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" and proceeds to torture his victims wih a comfy chair and a soft pillow. During the surfeit of Mary Queen of Scots a few years ago, Monty Python produced a skit that reduced the enigmatic Scotswoman's appeal to its formulaic minimum--a long series of sounds as Mary Queen of Scots is battered to death until on gruff soldier's voice murmurs, "Is she dead yet?" and Mary squeaks back, "No, I'm not" not" and the battering begins again.

British class warfare is summarized in a bout between a heavyweight champion and Lord Clark of Civilization for the Slade Professorship of Fine Arts at Oxford (Lord Clark loses in the first round). The defeat of Alistair Cooke, the boring commentator on Masterpice Theatre, is even more ignominious--he is overpowered by a duck while reminiscing of Philadelphia.

The test of humor is its staying power--the Marx brothers are still funny forty years later. You can't apply that criterion to Monty Python yet. But my roommates have been answering my questions about the weird things they say lately with quotes like "Well, that's where my claim falls to the ground" or "It's a pun" and "It's people like you what cause unrest." This could go too far. I don't know how I could take a lunch made out of spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, chicken tetrazzini and spam.