Monty Python: Live at Aspen

"U.S. COMEDY ARTS FESTIVAL TRIBUTE TO MONTY PYTHON"

What a lovely day.

Starring John Cleese

Terry Gilliam

Eric Idle

Terry Jones

Michael Palin

and Graham Chapman

Hosted by Robert Klein

Ladies and gentlemen, your host Robert Klein.

Thank you very much.

Back in 1973 I was getting ready to release my first comedy album,

"Child of the 50's" ... or was it 1873?

... and in the studio was this album, we were on the same label,

it was called "Now for Something Completely Different."

I put on a cut and it was completely incomprehensible to me.

Then a few days later there was a screening at a producer's house of a film

called "And Now For Something Completely Different,"

and I saw the Parrot sketch, like you all did,

and my heart fell to Monty Python.

Well, it's not hard to like a bunch of middle-class guys,

British men who often dress as women

and whose name translated in Japanese as "The Gay Boys' Dragon Show."

The material hit on archetypes which time hasn't touched,

and as a result, new generations of fans keep coming and coming,

like my own 14-year-old son.

A case in point is this, from a young fan who recently wrote to the web page which is called Pythonline:

"I just saw the Holy Grail by Monty Python.

I think it is one of the funniest movies I have ever seen since The Breakfast Club.

I want to see some of the other movies, and I also heard that there was a t.v. show.

Is this true?

I really liked the movie,

even though it was hard to tell what they were saying with their thick Australian accents."

... Was there ever a t.v.show?

Not like this there wasn't.

And now, ladies and gentleman, the almost full Monty.

It's wonderful to have you all here,

and of course some of them may know but basically, how did the group get together?

I think I met John first.

I met - I was on a train and I met John,

and Mike was collecting the tickets, I think you were,

and Terry and Eric were doing a bank robbery down here,

it was the sort of Great Train Robbery time...

Who are you?

My name is Eddie Izzard.

He's not in the group!

Who'd have thought, thirty year ago,

we'd all be sitting around drinking Chateau de Chassily ...

Get off, get your own jokes ...

Wait, I can do you!

get your own jokes

Strange women lying in ponds...!!!

We're off!

I'm so sorry, the security around here is...

So let me ask you this, how did you all get together?

"I've noticed a tendency for this program to get rather silly.

Now I do my best to keep things moving along,

but I'm not having things getting silly."

You were six, and of course Graham Chapman passed away in 1989.

He would have loved this.

He would.

He would have.... But he's DEAD.

Stone DEAD. He is no more.

Ceased to be.

Stone fucking DEAD.

That's his chair there.

It's a tragedy.

I'm sorry that I never met the man

and I wish he could be here because he would have loved this.

Well he is here.

Yeah, he is. I brought him ... from London.

You ... brought him?

Yes. Shall we have him on?

Please!

Graham Chapman.

Keep quiet.

Is it true that the BBC wanted Flying Circus in the title?

The BBC had to call it something on their schedule

so they started calling it by the name of the executive who was in charge who was Barry Took,

and they called it "Barry Took's Flying Circus."

We rather liked Flying Circus and then we had to decide whose it was.

And then we thought it might be Gwen Dibley's, because... who was she?

Well I just found, at my mother-in-law's one quiet weekend,

she was reading a magazine of the Townswomen's Guild,

sort of people who do good work in the counties of England,

and in each of these places they have embroidery classes

and flower arranging and all that... FLOWER ARRANGING!

and they also had a little bit where it said "accompanied by Gwen Dibley on the piano"

and the name Gwen Dibley sort of intrigued me

and I thought how nice it would be to give someone their own series without them knowing,

so that only when the listings came out for that weekend, the family would say,

"Mum! You've got the series ... on television!"

The very first scripts that went into the BBC were called Bunn Whackett Buzzle Stubble and Boot,

which was a football team that John and Graham had,

and we were calling it Bunn Whackett Buzzle Stubble and Boot right up to the day before the Radio Times had to go to press.

And the BBC rang us up and said now come on,

you've got to call it something sensible, this is stupid!

We were all sitting there in John's place, I think as far as I remember,

and we said oh it's got to be somebody's flying circus,

and I think John said how about something slimy, slithery...

Untrustworthy...

...typical show business agent,

so we all said "Python! Python! Python!"

and then somebody else shouted out "Monty" which made us laugh

because Monty to us means Lord Montgomery, our great general of the second world war..

Who is he?!

I thought it was Monty Shosheim, the Jazz musician!

Jazz clarinet ...

Yeah.

It was a great moment, I rushed home to my brother and said "We've got a title, at last!

It's gonna be Monty Python's Flying Circus!" and he said "it'll never work."

Monty Python's Flying Circus

Did they not pay attention for a while?

You got away with a lot early on?

There was a period when there was a lot of freedom.

No one kept an eye on us at all.

We were paid very little, we just worked out of the basement,

got all our gear together, went out 'round the country filming these ridiculous things,

and nobody bothered us at all until we had the masturbation problem.

Sorry, I had the masturbation problem!

No, we did a sketch about the Summarize Proust Competition in which someone gave their hobbies,

they were asked their hobbies, and he said "Strangling animals, golf and masturbating."

Terrific roar of laughter from the audience.

And the BBC came to us, the heads of the BBC had a look at this and said,

you cannot have masturbating, we cannot put masturbating out on television.

And we fought them, we went and had this wonderful meeting at the BBC,

the six of us sitting around, uh, with Graham,

trying to reason with Duncan Wood, his name was, about using the word "masturbating."

What's wrong with masturbating?

You masturbate, don't you Duncan?

Well, uh, well,....

Behind his desk, and all that ...

Anyway, in the end, they won, and we had to cut out "masturbating."

So out came the sketch and it said "strangling animals, golf," pause, HUGE laugh!

Enormous laugh at the word "golf"!

"What are your hobbies outside summarizing?"

"Well, it's strangling animals, golf and ..."

I always thought, hmm, strangling animals is all right but masturbating isn't?

With all the confidence so many years later, about 25 or so, John,

you weren't completely confident right off the bat, were you?

Well I had a very strange experience on our stage tour.

I'm sure they all remember it differently

but I remember we started off in Brighton,

we worked our way to the Midlands and we were doing a show in Bristol,

and we were doing a matinee there,

and for some extraordinary reason, the audience just didn't laugh.

And after about...

So after about four sketches...

of this Bristol matinee audience not laughing at something

that people had been falling around at for two weeks

I realized that they were right and that it wasn't funny.

I'm being perfectly serious, if people aren't laughing, it isn't funny.

And then the next house came in the evening

and they started to laugh again in all the right places

and the show became funny again.

But I mean comedy's incredibly brittle,

and if something goes wrong with the atmosphere you're dead.

The first recording I remember the reaction being very very quiet,

because the BBC has a sort of audience selection unit

and as they didn't know what Monty Python was going to be like, they didn't know which audience to get for it.

So we had an audience of old-age pensioners and people...

They thought it was a circus.

They came in and said "there's no animals."

So you know where the little old ladies look like that...

... that's why we put them in because that was like our first audience.

You call them pepperpots, right?

Now you broke it up into groups, you mostly wrote in various groups,

they were Terry Jones and Michael, right?

yeah...

You and Graham often wrote together, you often wrote alone,

and Terry was alone in his attic, right?

Now what is your, I mean you're the most mysterious Python in a way

because you were off making ...

Ooooo !!

... and, uh, the wonderful foot and use of all these artworks,

what was it like, were you more or less alone when they were rehearsing in the studio ...

Yeah, in some ways I was the most free because they had to submit their material to the group,

and everybody voted on whether it went into the good pile, the medium pile or the shit pile.

My stuff was never comprehensible to them, and often not to me either,

and I would sort of explain to them what I was doing

and they would all just look like they're doing now.

"It's time for the cartoon"

But that's the key to what was one of the things that was completely different.

Up to now it seems that most television shows were cameras taking pictures of a proscenium stage.

Well one of the things we decided very early on was to get rid of punch lines,

because before you would see, one was, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had a wonderful show

and they would do great characters, and the sketch would go along fantastic,

and then they would have to go into the punch line,

and invariably the punch line wasn't as good as the body of the sketch,

so we solved it, you know, the Gordian Knot, chop.

Get rid of the punch line.

"This is the silliest sketch I've ever been in."

"Shall we stop it?"

"Yeah all right."

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 humor 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.

There's one thing that I really wanted to do at one point