And now for something ...

BBC America has been airing a recent special called "The Monty Python Story," and all I can say is it's about damn time. My wife and many of her contemporaries, like most other people under 30, do not see the full impact of Monty Python, because they have always lived in a post-Python world. It's like going back in time to the Dawn of Man and stepping on a butterfly -- when you came back, only you would know that the world had been completely changed by your innocent act. Everyone else would only assume that the world has always been that way.

When Python hit the scene in 1969, I was in England, but I was never up that late so I didn't see it till it came to America via PBS in the mid-70s. Simply put, it bent my brain, like your first view of Un chien Andalou or Metropolis or any of Mike Jittlov's short films or a Dali painting -- or MST3K, come to that. Here was not just comedy, not just brilliant comedy ... it was a re-imagining of what comedy was.

Now, of course, I know that the Python kids were helped along by people like Spike Milligan, but the original TV series Monty Python's Flying Circus still managed to take it's own path and remains one of the very few examples of a television show that had nearly-total creative freedom. For years I was in love with it on so many different levels that I actually found it hard to articulate to people (folks who know me will tell you that expressing an opinion is rarely a problem with me). Having lived in England, I got a lot of the BBC-oriented jokes, the parodies of programmes that were running at the time, the references to historical and current figures in British culture -- a lot of stuff my American friends didn't know or care about. To them, it was just funny, and they didn't have to be aware of the crimes of the Spanish Inquisition to find it hysterical. To this day I can quote large chunks of Python sketches, and at one time my friend Bill Krubsack and I could, on demand, recite the entire Holy Grail movie (including the Moose subtitles!).

There have been several documentaries on Python, but all were more-or-less hit parades of clips from the TV show. Recently, though, we Python fans have been getting a bit more to chew on. A few years back, the group (yes, everybody, even the deceased Graham Chapman) reunited in Aspen, Colorado of all places to submit to an interview by the painfully unfunny Robert Klein (guest appearance by Eddie Izzard, who is in fact fuckin' funny). Nice.

Now comes The Monty Python Story, which finally gets around to interviewing the Pythons in some depth about the origins of the show, their lives together and apart, and what the future holds (not much, if you're hoping for another movie or a reunion). While the selfish part of me is disappointed that they don't keep dusting off the Parrot Sketch and putting it on the road, the better part of me agrees with Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam, who said there's nothing more pathetic than a bunch of middle-aged men struggling to recreate the halcyon days of their lost youth. Now will somebody tell this to The Rolling Stones?