John Philip Sousa never had it so good.
As famous as The March King became for his rousing flag-wavers like The Stars And Stripes Forever and Semper Fidelis, one Sousa march has surpassed them all. Its permanent place in the pantheon of human culture has been guaranteed by the sheer luck of being chosen as the theme for an offbeat British television series that ran on BBC1 on Sunday nights at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s.
That show began something like this.
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Monty Python’s Flying Circus – Opening Sequence
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The song is “The Liberty Bell March”, and while a lot of people don’t know it by name, they do know that it’s the theme for the television shows known collectively as Monty Python’s Flying Circus. From the bell-clang at the beginning to the Bronzino bare-foot stomp at the end, it’s just the first example of how this innovative and anarchic troupe of Oxbridge Brits played with music as well as words in their irreverent and groundbreaking humor.
The show consisted of sets of linked sketches, often joined by animated bits that somehow managed to connect totally discontinuous subjects. Occasionally the animation would become one of the sketches, or the characters in a sketch would morph into animation – and the whole thing flowed along in a continuous stream of wit, satire, and just plain funny that was unlike anything that had been seen on television before.
Almost all of these sketches and animations employed music in some form. Often the jokes themselves were musical. Music was completely integral to Monty Python’s style of humor. The Pythons all had experience in the comedy-and-theatricals clubs at their respective universities (Oxford or Cambridge, excepting the lone Yank, animator Terry Gilliam). They shared a common upbringing (again, excepting Gilliam) in postwar Britain, with its dance halls and radio comedies.
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A short walk through the series’ 45 episodes will demonstrate how important music was in the Python worldview.
Sometimes the humor took a popular musical trope and turned it on its ear, such as Terry Jones’s performance of an old-fashioned burlesque-hall strip-tease. Note that this sketch is performed without dialog, the acting done in pantomime over the music. Many Python sketches followed this format.
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Monty Python’s Flying Circus – “The Stripper”
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Sometimes music was the accompaniment, creating the setting for whatever was going on visually. This was especially common in Terry Gilliam’s paper-cutout animations, which were stuffed full of tunes, sound effects, and voice-overs.
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Monty Python’s Flying Circus – “Conrad Poohs And His Dancing Teeth”
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Sometimes the music was just distorted beyond all recognition.
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Monty Python’s Flying Circus – “Mouse Organ”
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Music runs beneath the action in all of the above examples, but the real treat was when Python wrote original musical numbers, composing the tunes and lyrics themselves. The best illustration of this is arguably the most famous sketch in the entire series. Put on your plaid shirt and fur hat, and sing, sing, sing! If you don’t know the words, you’ve led a deprived life, and there’s very little hope for you. Go look them up yourself.
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Monty Python’s Flying Circus – “The Lumberjack Song”
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Monty Python’s Flying Circus ran on television for four years, but the end of its run was by no means the end of Monty Python. They had already taken many of their best bits, along with new material, and released them as long-playing record albums. As you might expect, musical numbers lent themselves especially well to this form, and a great many classic Python tunes were never part of the TV series.
Political personalities of the day got Pythonized. Here’s a Dixieland-esque number reminiscent of the Jazz Age, of all things. That’s not by accident.
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Monty Python – “Henry Kissinger”
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So did events from the past. This is the best synopsis of the English Civil War ever to not grace the history books. Another example of using someone else’s music for their own purposes, these words are sung to the melody of the first section of Frédéric Chopin’s Heroic Polonaise.
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Monty Python – “Oliver Cromwell”
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Now let’s talk about the movies.
A lot of people know Python best from their films, and music is a big part of the reason for that. When short sketches became feature-length plots, the space for theatricality expanded, allowing for a lot more singing and dancing and music of all sorts.
Python’s first film, 1971′s And Now For Something Completely Different, was just a reworking of some of the sketches from the first two seasons of the television series. In 1974, however, Python took on a different piece of British history, wrote an original script around it, and claimed it forever. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a little movie about King Arthur made on a shoestring budget (with financial help from musical friends in Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and Led Zeppelin), became first a cult classic, then lost the adjective. So timeless has been its appeal that more than thirty years after its release, it spawned its own Broadway-musical adaptation, Spamalot, written by Python veteran Eric Idle with musician/composer John Du Prez.
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Monty Python And The Holy Grail (1974) – “Knights Of The Round Table”
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Spamalot (2006) – “Knights Of The Round Table”
(that’s Tim Curry as King Arthur)
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Then they got ambitious.
What began as a smart-ass ad-libbed answer to the question “What’s your next movie about?” (“Jesus Christ – Lust For Glory”), became Monty Python’s Life Of Brian (1979), a story about the schmuck born in the next-door manger in Bethlehem. I’m not going to divert into a big discussion of this film (although I certainly could), but instead we’ll jump to the end, because that’s where the best song is. Leave it to Monty Python, or more specifically Eric Idle since he wrote the thing, to take one of the heaviest and most emotionally charged scenes in the entire history of western civilization, and turn it into a soft-shoe anthem to hope and optimism, sung from crucifixes. Damn, that’s cheeky. It’s also fuckin’ brilliant.
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Monty Python’s Life Of Brian (1979) – “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life”
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‘Bright Side’ is another example of the impact of Python’s music in popular culture. The song became a sports anthem in Britain in the 1990s, sung from the terraces by the crowds at soccer games. It was also sung as a eulogy by those who attended Python alumnus Graham Chapman’s funeral in 1989. But the story that beats both of those occurred in 1982, during the Falklands War in the southern Atlantic. When the British destroyers HMS Sheffield and HMS Coventry were struck by Argentinian missiles and were taking on water, their crews sang ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’ while standing on the decks awaiting rescue from the sinking ships. They all received medals from the Queen for Exemplary Trolling Of The Enemy While Under Fire. Well, they should have.
We saw ‘Bright Side’ again just last summer, at the closing ceremonies for the London Olympics.
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London Olympics Closing Ceremonies (2012) – “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life”
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Life Of Brian also got reworked into another musical form, becoming a full-blown oratorio in 2007, Not The Messiah (He’s A Very Naughty Boy), again by Eric Idle and John Du Prez. [Isn't it great how even the titles are perfect plays on the things they parody? In this case, the über-oratorio, Handel's Messiah. That was mostly just luck, but holy hell, it's funny.] Complete with orchestra, chorus, operatic soloists, and roles or cameos by most of the surviving Pythons, it was performed at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2009 as part of the 40th anniversary celebration of the airing of the original Flying Circus television series.
Oh, just go watch the whole thing. You didn’t have anything better to do for the next hour and a half anyway. You’re welcome.
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Not The Messiah (He’s A Very Naughty Boy) – Royal Albert Hall – 10/23/2009
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Python didn’t just make films, though. In 1980, after Life of Brian, they took their show on the road, all the way to the Hollywood Bowl in southern California. The performance was recorded on video and given a theatrical release in 1982.
You can find the whole show at YouTube (yeah, okay, here) but I’ll just give you a couple of samples.
This is Python at its most irreverent, starting the show off with a very British bang while sending up WW2-era patriotic anthems. Again we see the post-war music-hall influence in the way the troupe used music and song in their work.
If you’re a prude, best skip this one.
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Monty Python At The Hollywood Bowl (1982) – “Sit On My Face”
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This next one is another of the most classic bits in all of Python. Remember that these guys were Oxford and Cambridge graduates. They were smart, and they gave credit to their audience for knowing what the hell they were talking about, getting literate jokes and intellectual humor. (They even make a joke of that fact here, poking fun at the Los Angeles audience.) Imagine that.
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Monty Python At The Hollywood Bowl (1982) – “The Bruces’ Philosophers Song”
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Monty Python made one more feature film, 1983′s Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life. This movie returned to the sketch-comedy formula of the group’s television days, presenting a series of vignettes in the basic format of the seven ages of man, although no central character is portrayed throughout.
Python’s propensity for send-up is in full flower in this scene, as Eric Idle plays a Noël Coward-like piano crooner, entertaining diners in an upscale restaurant. Coward never wrote this kind of lyric, though, or if he did, he kept it to himself.
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Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life (1983) – “The Penis Song”
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The second portion of ‘Part I – The Miracle Of Birth’ represents the Pythons at the very peak of their musical excellence. They took the idea of sending up Roman Catholicism and its stance on birth control, and turned it into a production-number masterpiece surpassing anything that Busby Berkeley and MGM could have done on their very best day. If I had to select just one favorite song out of everything I’ve posted here, this would be the one. It’s perfect.
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Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life (1983) – “Every Sperm Is Sacred”
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To attempt to put an end to this before I die of old age, let me wrap up by saying that I hope you’ve enjoyed this jaunt through the musical work of one of my very favoritest favorite things on the entire planet. For me, Monty Python is a desert-island necessity. If you don’t get Python, it’s just about impossible for me to like you. (There are plenty of worse ways to pick your friends.) I’ve laughed at Python humour (hey, they’re Brits) nearly every day of my life since I first saw Flying Circus on late-night PBS. I know I’m not the only one who can say that. It isn’t all just reminiscence and vintage videos on DVD, either. In addition to the examples of Python’s current-day popularity that I’ve posted above, there are lots of others that make clear the influence Python has had on today’s comedy-makers and visual artists – and how much those folks recognize the magnitude of the debt they owe to John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, and Terry Gilliam.
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South Park Tribute to Monty Python (1999)
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Family Guy – Opening Sequence – 1/6/2013
(two weeks ago)
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Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I’ve got to go clean the junk email out of my inbox.
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Thanks for a wonderful post. I remember much of it fondly although I was far too young to catch it in the original run. Yes “Always look on the bright side” is a very popular thing here and often played after bad sporting news or just sung by people who have had one of those days. I was glad it was highlighted again in the Olympics.
Their TV show was just irreverent, I loved it. Once famous tidbit you might not know is to do with the dead parrot sketch. Where a man tries to return a dead parrot with the store owner claiming it is just asleep. Mrs Thatcher used this sketch once to hammer an opposing political party who have a logo of a yellow parrot and in her speech said “This parrot is dead, dead, dead”
I just can’t gush enough about how much I love Python.
That Margaret, she knew how to make a point. Great anecdote, no I didn’t know that.
I think I was the one person who enjoyed Jabberwocky, Anyway, thanks this brought back some memories.
Jabberwocky was a weird hybrid, not technically a Python movie, but with Pythons in it, and directed by Gilliam. I was sort of nonplussed by it when it came out, but now that I know what Gilliam has done since, and how weird all his stuff is to begin with, I appreciate it a lot more. I don’t include it in a list of Python films, at least not this time when I already had way more material to work with than I needed. I could type the world’s longest blog article on this stuff if I REALLY got into it in detail! And so many tangents to go off on … I may do some small posts later today or tomorrow, we’ll see.
Well…hahahah it’s not a Python film so shouldn’t be included. Just was reminded about it after all these years.
A lot of people thought it WAS a Python film, though, it caused some confusion. Gilliam directing, Palin starring, Jones in it too. It was the next film out after Holy Grail – HG was ’74, Jabberwocky was ’77. Same year as Star Wars, haha.
I’m gonna have to watch it now. I distictly remember a guy pooping out of an upstairs window. Yah, that’s all I remember. But that’s a vivid memory.
Oh, and I just accidentally moderated a comment somewhere via mobile. Its probably gone. Whomever – I’m sorry for idiocy.
My random-useless memory tells me that that was Mr. Fishfingers. The room/building/house was built on stilts over a swamp. His butt was hanging out of the window, the rest of him was inside.
Yes? We will both have to go watch, now. Been eons since I watched this.
Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I wonder if I’ll still think it is funny? got to check it out now.
hahaha I have it on DVD in my box-o-discs, maybe I’ll put it on tonight after I’m done watching hockey. Let me know when you’ve seen it, and we can compare.
Its its its its its its the ITS MAN.
I cant tell you guys how much Joy MP brings to my life.
I’m not a big music buff or whatevahhhh
But I’d just like to say kudos to all authors for taking their time and writing all the posts, coming up with ideas, content, and a lot more
Hhaha, Jasp. You just don’t want to turn us on to your Belgian crunk sex trance drugs.
Thanks, Jasssssssppppppp (say it like Duper says “Thanks, Daaaaannnnn”) That’s such a nice thing to say.
Oh you! <3