by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Monty Python Conquers America — also known as Monty Python: The Other British Invasion (other to what? 1775? 1812? 1964?) — is an hour-long TV special originally included
as bonus content on a DVD mega-box of the complete Monty Python’s
Flying Circus (at least all the shows that
are known to exist). The box actually featured two documentaries, one on the prehistory of Monty Python
— the various appearances the Pythoners made on BBC shows (including a
children’s show called Do Not Adjust Your Set) and how they came together to form the comedy
troupe we all know and love — and this one, dealing with the 1970-76 period
during which Monty Python were established as American attractions despite the
conviction of most of the U.S. entertainment business that the Pythons were too
outré, too intellectual and just
too damned British ever to win an
American audience. One person rather stupidly says, “British humor just never
went over in America” — to which my immediate reaction was, “Huh? Do the names
‘Charlie Chaplin’ and ‘Peter Sellers’ mean anything to you?” If there’s a flaw
in Monty Python Conquers America
it’s the usual one of biopics, especially biodocs: what I call “first-itis,”
the assertion that the people you’re biographing are the first people to do
something even though it’s relatively easy to trace other people who did it
before.
As great as they are, Monty Python had a long string of antecedents in
British comedy, some of them featuring people (including Peter Sellers and the
Beatles) who became major U.S. stars. The real birthplace of the zany sort of British comedy — at
least the earliest example I know of; there may be others even farther back
(there are hints of the Python frame-breaking as early as Gracie Fields, who
commemorated her move from EMI Records to the cheap Rex label by starting her
first record for Rex, “Why don’t you buy my new Rex record? It’s only a bob!”)
— was the Goon Squad, a BBC radio show in the early 1950’s starring Peter
Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, which also produced a series of hit
records for EMI’s Parlophone label that were produced by George Martin (and the
heavy use of sound effects on the records by the Goon Squad was experience that
stood Martin in good stead when he worked on records by his later stars, the
Beatles). Martin’s autobiography All You Need Is Ears mentions one record that the Goons did that was a
parody of the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, only at the last minute Columbia Pictures
threatened to sue them if they used the name “Kwai,” so they changed the album
title to The Bridge on the River Wye
and Martin had to go through the master tape and carefully snip out the letter
“K” in “Kwai” wherever it appeared. He also recalled taking a meat cleaver and
various melons to the studio to determine which would create the most
convincing sound effect of a prisoner of war being beheaded — much the way
Alfred Hitchcock would a few years later to determine how to do the sound of
Anthony Perkins stabbing Janet Leigh in Psycho. The success of the Goons spawned other British
troupes, including Flanders and Swann (a duo who spoofed classical music and
all sorts of other things) and probably the Pythons’ most obvious precursor,
Beyond the Fringe (Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and yet another British comedian who became a major U.S. star,
Dudley Moore), at least some of whom performed successfully in the U.S.
This
strain of zany British humor was also seen in the Beatles’ movies A
Hard Day’s Night and Help!, as well as the much-maligned Magical
Mystery Tour, and so it shouldn’t have been
as great a surprise as it was to a lot of people when, after some bizarre false
starts (including a Buddah Records release of the Pythons’ first two record
albums, Another Monty Python Record
and Monty Python’s Previous Record,
and an appearance on the Tonight Show in 1972 in which the Pythons’ humor just sailed over the heads of the
studio audience), the Monty Python TV show finally was made available for
syndication on U.S. stations in the early 1970’s. After the commercial networks
passed, it ended up on PBS (where it probably belonged anyway; in the
mid-1970’s PBS was running so many British shows, from Masterpiece
Theatre to Upstairs, Downstairs,
The Forsyte Saga, I, Claudius and the like,
that some wags called it “BBC West”) and was first aired in the U.S. in October
1974 on KERA-TV in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Despite the legendary
conservatism of Texas, this crazy show, with its bad drag queens and overall
air of irreverence for the conventions of everything, including filmed comedy, somehow caught on and gave
KERA literally the best ratings
by far it had ever had as a PBS station. (“We had a 6! We’d never had a 6
before!” enthused the son of the program director who had ordered it aired.)
The show details how Monty Python slowly built an audience, station by station
and city by city, and how they already had a fanatical following in Canada
(where they literally were
treated by rock stars — their tour was promoted by someone who’d previously
done Led Zeppelin and was relieved that the Pythons didn’t feel a compulsion to
trash their hotel rooms after they got back from their gigs — and one of the
Pythons joked that it was like being in a rock band except you didn’t get
groupies: “The kinds of groupies who follow a comedy troupe aren’t the kind
you’d want anything to do with anyway”) when the U.S. finally started to notice
them.
I’d already heard of the Pythons before their show first aired on the San
Francisco Bay Area PBS station KQED in the summer of 1975 — a friend of mine
had given me a mix tape of various oddball British and German songs that ended
with a brief snippet from one of the Monty Python LP’s (I forget what it was
and it didn’t particularly impress me), and I’d seen the trailer for the first
Python film, And Now for Something Completely Different (a compilation of sketches from the TV show — though
refilmed and sometimes with considerable variations — produced by Playboy
Enterprises’ film division and supposedly distributed by Columbia Pictures, who
pretty much abandoned the film after it flopped in initial screenings), and
wondered what that was about. But
when the TV show came on, and the initial episode featured the talk-show spoof It’s
A. Tree — “featuring the legendary
intellectual, Arthur Tree” — and A. Tree turned out to be a real tree, with an animated mouth in the middle of its
trunk, while his guests were “a block of wood, a patch of creosote and a piece
of laminated plastic” — which hooked me then and forever on the Pythons’
relentless sense of humor. What’s amazing from this show is that there were a
hard core of people who’d experienced Monty Python and believed there would be an American audience for it — and also the later
comedians who were influenced by Python, though not always to their best: Hank
Azaria, David Hyde Pierce, Judd Apatow, Jay Roach, Trey Parker, Matt Stone,
Paul Rudd, and Jimmy Fallon. As outrageous as Monty Python often got, they
didn’t become in-your-face gross until their last project together, Monty
Python’s The Meaning of Life — they had
much to do with the “fart humor” that so dominates modern-day movie “comedy” as
Wagner had to do with creating Guy Lombardo; what passes for comedy these days
in movies and on TV has generally copied the Pythons’ irreverence but not their intellectual approach to humor or the breadth
of knowledge that has allowed them at once to ridicule the clichés of comedy
and to transcend them.
