And now, for some high culture

When “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” first began taping in London, in the fall of 1969, studio audiences were totally unprepared for what they were about to see. People brought in off the street, expecting to watch one of the BBC’s comedies or variety shows—most of them broad and campy—were given, for example, a sketch about sheep who try to fly, and how flying sheep, with the right engineering, might be made to accommodate human passengers and used for economical mass transit. Older ladies, bused in and anticipating domestic comedy—or even an actual circus—were given a play-by-play account of Pablo Picasso’s efforts to paint a masterpiece while riding a bicycle. That segment, filmed in the suburbs of London and shown to the studio audience, included references to Chagall, Miró, Brancusi, and Léger—and marked perhaps the first and only time that Kurt Schwitters has been used as a punch line. Did the audience laugh? Not much.

After the first handful of episodes aired in Britain—late on Sundays—few people knew what to make of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” BBC executives were concerned, the family members of the group were concerned, and, for the most part, the members of Python were concerned. “Do you realize,” John Cleese said to Michael Palin before the first taping, “this could be the first comedy show to go out with absolutely no laughs at all?” When the comedy was big and wet—sixteen-ton weights falling onto cast members, would-be soldiers killed while attacking each other with bananas and raspberries—the response was warm. Much of the time, though, the studio audiences were respectful but confused. BBC executives shuttled the show into ever-changing time slots, and hoped it would disappear.

“Monty Python’s Flying Circus” was a sketch show written and performed by six men—Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin—all of whom (except for Gilliam, an American) had attended Cambridge or Oxford, writing and performing in college revues. After college, they enjoyed successful careers in TV, including stints on the droll news sendup “The Frost Report” and a children’s show called “Do Not Adjust Your Set.” When they joined forces, they created a program that combined startling erudition, theatrical precision, and utter madness. All the while, the Pythons employed a brazenness about what they considered funny that went unmatched until the early days of “Late Night with David Letterman.” In any given episode of “Monty Python,” there are usually only a few segments that would be considered ha-ha funny by a wide swath of people. These sketches, involving silly walks, nudges and winks, and songs about cross-dressing lumberjacks, share equal time with those segments which are disquieting—like the sketch wherein a son takes his dead mother to the undertaker and, after considering various burying and cremation options, decides to eat her. Some bits were just willfully odd. A man in full armor hitting a man with a rubber chicken, for example, may have been preceded by a sophisticated satire of the British judicial system, with a cameo, for no discernible reason, by Cardinal Richelieu.

“Monty Python” was always closer to Dada than to “Laugh-In,” and as the show matured the episodes became ever more conceptually advanced. In 2000, A&E reissued, on DVD, all forty-five episodes of the show in one boxed set, and watching them in order reveals a steady progression: at first, the group seems generally eager for the audience’s approval, even mugging occasionally; over the course of seasons two, three, and four, the writing becomes braver, angrier, stylistically restless, and more likely to go for long stretches without overt attempts at humor. Monty Python’s goal was not only to make audiences laugh but, just as important, to tear apart the medium of television with extreme prejudice. As a whole, the series, which ended in 1974, has no competition for being the most consistently bizarre program ever aired on TV.

Was it a British thing? That was the assumption by some, and it remains the explanation offered by those for whom Python’s humor does little. In the early days, there were various halfhearted attempts to bring the show over to the United States—Lorne Michaels reportedly sold “Saturday Night Live” as “ ‘Monty Python’ meets ‘60 Minutes’ ”—but the first major exposure American audiences had to Python was via Johnny Carson. After a highly successful Canadian stage tour in 1973, the group was invited to do a series of sketches on the “Tonight Show”—hosted by Joey Bishop on that particular night. The result was dropped-jaw silence. The curtain went up and Chapman and Idle performed a piece involving the burying of a cat. Idle: “I just spent four hours burying the cat.” Chapman: “Four hours to bury the cat?” Idle: “Yes, it wouldn’t keep still, wriggling about, howling its head off.” It was a while before network television came calling again. Did the Pythons care? Not much. Then and always, they cared if people laughed, but they didn’t care if everyone laughed.

In 1974, a group of PBS stations bought broadcast rights for the first three seasons, and soon enough the show was sluicing its way into the brains of, according to Palin, “insomniacs, intellectuals, and burglars” in North America. In addition to the expected audience of college students—who understood the show as a collision between a comedy-variety show and surrealism in its purest form—others just liked to laugh at the funny men dressed as middle-aged women. The show wasn’t always easy to find in the United States, but its following became central to any effective PBS pledge drive. The Pythons were heroes to the Second City contingent, and had made their way to Graceland. Elvis Presley, a big fan, was known to quote Idle’s “Nudge Nudge” skit to his friends.

With a growing audience came attempts to conquer the United States through movies. Their first film, “And Now for Something Completely Different”—essentially a string of extant skits filmed and stitched together, with better production values—didn’t make much of a splash at the box office. “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” was released in 1975, after the completion of the fourth and final season, when the members of the group were already considering what their post-Python personas would be. The film, an account of King Arthur assembling his knights and their quest for the Holy Grail, was filmed in Scotland, on a budget of about two hundred thousand pounds. Unable to fund the movie through established production companies, the group, popular in the rock world, secured investments from members of Pink Floyd, Genesis, and Led Zeppelin, who chipped in some twenty thousand pounds each. The five-week shoot was brutal. It rained most days, and the Pythons spent much of their time in faux-chain-mail costumes made of heavy wool, soaked through. For their suffering, and for their writing and acting services, each member of Monty Python was paid about four thousand pounds.

“The Holy Grail” did a decent business, as did their next film, ninety minutes of vicious and brilliant heresy called “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (1979). The story of a man (Chapman), who is mistaken for the Messiah, it was as much a satire of religious zealotry as it was a comment on Middle East factionalism in the seventies, featuring the inevitable and deadly battle between the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front. Protests by Christian leaders preceded it everywhere it went, and it was banned in Ireland.

The group’s final movie, “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life” (1983), marked a return to an episodic format, and was the angriest thing the group had ever created. It included a sequence wherein Graham Chapman is chased over a cliff by a pack of topless women wearing helmets, and “Every Sperm Is Sacred,” possibly the most elaborate Catholic-mocking Busby Berkeley production number ever committed to film. “The Meaning of Life,” too, was banned in Ireland, but it was sent to Cannes as a British entry. On landing in France, Terry Jones, who had directed the film, declared that Monty Python would win a major award, because the group had bribed the judges. “The Meaning of Life” actually did win the Special Grand Jury Prize, and in his acceptance speech Jones (whose suit jacket bore the words “eat more pork”) let the judges know that the money was in the bathroom, behind the washbasins.

At that point, the group called it quits and went their separate ways. Idle and Cleese eventually moved to California to act in movies and do their own writing. Gilliam went on to a successful career as a director of films, among them “Brazil” and “Twelve Monkeys,” often employing former Pythons. Palin appeared in “Brazil,” for example, and also wrote novels and guidebooks, and hosts a series of BBC travel shows. Jones directed his own movies, including “Personal Services”—also banned in Ireland—and “The Wind in the Willows,” and at the moment is writing op-eds for the Guardian. Chapman died in 1989. The Pythons have appeared together only twice in the past eighteen years.