Stuff You Should Know - How Monty Python Worked: SYSK Live from LA Podfest

Episode Date: November 10, 2016

Things get awesome when Josh and Chuck do a live show on Monty Python at the LA Podcast Festival. Hang out as the duo dives into the "Beatles of Comedy," what made them tick, what made them so funny, the whole bit. Plus, Kevin Pollak crashes the stage. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's not here, but we are here live

in beautiful Los Angeles, California for the Los Angeles Podcast Festival. Woo! Very nice. This crowd is massive. Yeah. Sounds massive. Yeah.

You were asking for it too. Yeah. I find that when you turn and point a microphone in people's face. Oh, man. Just drives them crazy. They make noise. It's a good old trick.

Walter Cronkite taught us that. It's the first person I could think of. First guy with the microphone that came to mind. Yep. So how are you feeling, man? You feeling good? I'm good and a little sleepy, but I'm not supposed to be honest.

I'm supposed to say, I feel great and charged, right? Right, I'm a little sleepy. So if I'm not funny, that's why. Yeah. We have a thing, Chuck and I have a thing literally now because we've encountered so many of them, of these kind of table cloths that are like pantyhose and to get anywhere near the microphone.

It's like a strength wrapped table. Right. Yeah. But made of like nylons, right? So you have to be like right up on it and it has this weird kind of give. Yeah. It's a little off-putting.

Kind of feels a little like sexy. Right. So if we're like sitting here doing this thing during the show. It's a little weird. It's this thing. I'm all over the place emotionally right now. Right. You're in a tailspin.

You ready? Yeah, I'm ready. So we're talking today about Monty Python, right? And if you'll go back with us, we're gonna head back to Swingin' London in 1968, where a group of English boys got together and started a little television show called How to Irritate People.

And it was actually a television special. And it was hosted by a guy named John Cleese. Yeah, written by a guy named John Cleese and a dude named Graham Chapman. And also starring a guy named Michael Palin. And those were the only three members of what would become Monty Python. Did I spoil it already?

But it was written by Cleese and Chapman. And sort of the goal here was to do a special and to get Americans primed for this thing called British humor and sell it to American audiences. But it sort of failed in that respect. It didn't generate a lot of interest among American, I guess, TV executives. Sure.

Yeah. Well, it was funny-ish, you know? It just wasn't, it wasn't quite Monty Python, but you could see the seeds in it, right? It was starting to grow from this. And about a year later, the BBC went to John Cleese and said, hey, we like what you did with How to Irritate People.

Do you want your own show? And Cleese said, sure, I'd love to have a show. But I don't want to be the star. I want to be part of an ensemble. And the BBC said, go put your team together. So he spoke into his wristwatch and said, Python, assemble. And they all came from different corners of the earth and came together and formed a giant robot with a sword.

The first time Monty Python ever came together. That would be amazing. So he said, all right, I have this friend, Graham Chapman, who went to Cambridge together. He's my writing partner. He's definitely in. And we just worked with this guy, Michael Palin. He's really funny.

So he should be in. But he was doing a show called Do Not Adjust Your Set. It was a kid show. And Cleese was a fan of that. And he said, well, that's wonderful. We would love you to come on. He says, well, I have these other guys on the show I really like working with.

So if you want me, you have to take this Welshman named Terry Jones and this other guy named Eric Idle. And this other weird looking American. And that's this weird looking weird all around. And Terry Gilliam. And Cleese was game. He said, fine, let's just get all of us together. And then there were six.

Yep. So they came together. And Terry Gilliam was definitely the odd man out. Here's from Minnesota. The other five had gone to what's called Oxbridge, right? Oxford and Cambridge, where they kind of have like a lockdown on TV writing in the UK. So if you went to Cambridge or you went to Oxford

and you want to get into TV writing, especially TV comedy writing, that's a pretty good place to start out. Yeah, like here in America, it's Rutgers, right? Right. Yeah, yeah. Or San Jose State. I can't ever always get this too confused. No, of course, it's Harvard.

Everyone knows that. But yeah, over there, it's Cambridge and Oxford. And it turns out if you go to one of those schools, you're probably a pretty smart, clever person, which is a good start if you want to be the world's greatest comedy troupe of all time, and Chuck's opinion. Is that all right? Yeah, that's fine.

I think you can share your opinion on this one. We probably won't get any angry listener mail on that. How could you say that? Right. You should help homeless people. How dare you say that? But I do agree. Money Python's pretty great.

You should probably explain that in your comment. Yes, we did it. Well, we did an episode on homelessness. And we released it around Thanksgiving or Christmas to really kind of stick it in people's heart, right? Yeah, our position was that you should help homeless people. Yeah, I mean, we took a stance on that. And we got probably more angry listener mail

than we've gotten for any other episode we've ever released about homeless people can all go to hell. You shouldn't be telling people they should give them money or all sorts of stuff. They made decisions that led to that. Right. They got what's coming to them. But everyone agrees, Money Python's great.

That was the overall point. So they were divided up into, sort of naturally divided into writing teams with them. They already had Cleese and Chapman who had known each other. And Michael Palin and Terry Jones worked together. Eric Idol was the lone wolf he wrote by himself. And Terry Gilliam has always been in his own world doing his animation.

And so he was sort of in his own space as well. Right. So they were getting primed and ready. And the BBC said, all right, we'll give you a run of 13 half hour episodes. And by the way, I've spent the past two weeks nonstop watching Flying Circus. It's been amazing.

It's like when your job is to sit around and watch Money Python and then come and talk about it live, you're doing pretty well in life. So a very lucky guy. And so they had to come up with a name. And Flying Circus was kind of always part of it. And the BBC, as legend goes, supposedly even said, guys, we've already printed, except they

said it with a cool accent. We've printed Flying Circus already. So you can't change that part. But you need to, if you have a front to that, then think of it quick. And I think Cleese said, what about a Python? Like something kind of slimy and weird. So they said Python.

And then apparently Monty Monty is just like sort of an English guy in the pub would be Monty, just sort of a tired English thing. Like Todd here in America. So Monty Python was born. They liked the ring of it. It literally means nothing. There's no significance other than they just

thought it sounded cool. Yeah, and they had other ideas besides Monty Python's Flying Circus first, too. They had a horse, a spoon, and a basin. It's pretty funny. Owl stretching time. I love that. The Toad Elevating Moment, bum-wacket, buzzard, stubble,

and boot. I think Monty Python's Flying Circus was the best of the bunch. Well, then they had a couple of things before Flying Circus even, EL Moist's Flying Circus, right? And Will Strangler's Flying Circus, which that's pretty good, too. Yeah, but that sounds too legit.

That everyone would be like, who's Will Strangler? Who's Will Strangler? Right. But then once you know it is Monty Python, you can't imagine anything else, right? It's like if our show was called, I don't know, The Explainerators. It's actually not bad.

You jot that down. Sorry, I got lost with the Explainerators. I went to a place. So if you ever want to get confused, research British television, because they don't call seasons, seasons, they call them series, right? So Monty Python had their first series, and then the next year they had their second series.

And I'm like, what is this person talking about? And then I finally looked it up after a couple of days. Did you really not know that until recently? Oh, OK. Yeah, and I knew from context what they were talking about. But it was kind of confusing, because by the time they get to the fourth series, they actually changed the name. Right, to just Monty Python.

That's what got me. Oh, sure. So they actually had four seasons. And the first season, it was pretty much what you would expect, right? This was really, really brand new cutting-edge stuff. And they actually were not the first to really kind of experiment with sketch comedy.

There was another show called Q5 that was done by a guy named Spike Milligan, who was like this legendary radio surreal comedic genius, right? And they followed on the footsteps of Q5, which had started just a few years before Flying Circus. But these guys took it to a whole other level. And the BBC had no idea what they had on their hands. So they would shuffle it around late at night.

Some weeks they would just not show it at all. Some entire regions of the UK didn't receive it. It was just treated pretty poorly. Yeah, and the deal with Q5, you can go watch some of this on YouTube. It's really good. And actually, the pythons were kind of upset because when they saw Q5, they're like, man, it's being done.

Like, that's what we wanted to do. We wanted to take comedy and give people something unexpected and turn it on its ear and subvert it and basically be weird. And so I went and looked up a little bit of Q5. And the one skit that I saw was literally like 15 seconds long. But it gives you a really good idea of what

Spike Milligan was doing. And it just opens on a shot of a man with a Mona Lisa paint by numbers. So half of it is finished. Half of it has the big white areas with the little numbers in there. And I think, well, that's funny. That's the joke.

And so the guy goes to paint. And he puts on the canvas. He paints another white section and writes a number. I was like, it got me. I was like, man, I didn't see it coming. It's pretty good. So that's what Spike Milligan was doing. And that's what Python was kind of shooting for,

was just to do something that people hadn't seen. Right. So even though they were not being treated well, there wasn't a lot of marketing or PR or whatever behind it, it still kind of developed a bit of a cult following, like word of mouth following among, I would guess, people taking acid in the 60s in London. Yeah, it was 1969.

It was in color, which was kind of a different thing. Yeah, that was a big deal. Yeah, especially when you think about Terry Gilliam's animations, like to see that in black and white. It'd still be great, but to see it in color late at night on acid must have been something else. Sure. So if you watched Flying Circus, I mean,

did anyone ever watch these episodes at all? They're all on YouTube. I encourage you. They have all 50, I think, 45 episodes on YouTube. Yeah, 45. And it's really amazing. Like when you watch it, you see the seeds of everything from Mr. Show to Tenacious D to Kids in the Hall.

Like Children's Hospital would not be a TV show if it wasn't for Monty Python and Flying Circus. Like this sort of absurdist silliness. Sometimes they'd make a statement. Sometimes it was physical comedy. Sometimes it was clever word play. It was really all over the map with what they were doing. Right.

And as we'll see, they've really kind of permeated pop cultures, everybody knows. But a lot of this stuff was just like a one-off thing, like the Spanish Inquisition. Everybody knows the Spanish Inquisition, right? No one expects the Spanish Inquisition. And they were on one episode. That just took place on one episode in season two.

And yet it's like basically one of the backbones of comedy pop culture. And that's a really good point about Monty Python, that they were just packing episodes with great idea after great idea and basically zero filler. And that was definitely part of one of the reasons why they were the seeds that grew all of these other things, too. Yeah, and one of the reasons why they're often

called the Beatles of comedy. Because they weren't together that long, but their ratio of great material to stuff. And you watch, I guess, like Saturday Night Live is probably the standard in the United States for years. And half of those sketches each week aren't great. Let's be honest. That's what sketch comedy is.

It's like a risk. You throw it out there. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. But when you look at Flying Circus and the Beatles, their ratio of great, great stuff to things that didn't quite work was just astounding. It was amazing.

Right. You? Sure. So one of the other hallmarks of Monty Python is that they played almost every character amongst themselves. Terry Gilliam played the fewest characters, because most of the time he was off doing animations that ended up proving really important to every episode

and then the show overall. So he usually played the least. But he also played some of the most memorable ones, usually just the dirtiest ones, like the character in the back. You're like, what's wrong with that guy? That was Terry Gilliam. Yeah, and he felt very much like out of his world. He was in awe of the other guys.

He knew. He was like, I'm nowhere near you, dude. So I'll do my weird animations. And if you need a crazy leper in an episode, I'm your guy. I'm the leper. Michael Palin is probably my favorite. But that's kind of like low-hanging fruit, to say Michael Palin's your favorite Python,

because he was pretty much everyone agrees that he was probably the best actor on the show. Yeah, he was probably the most broad and accessible comedian with like raw comedic talents. And who did I say last week? Graham Chapman. Was your favorite? Yeah.

I think you did, yeah. I think I've changed my mind. Oh, OK. And when you watch enough Monty Python, and I think that's kind of the point that you're going to get through this whole thing, there's an all-star in every episode, in every sketch. And you kind of end up changing your mind a lot.

But I'm on Eric Idle right now, big time. Oh, are you? Yeah, he's pretty great. He's people like, yeah, that's awesome. That's a muttering. Man, he was good. Still is. So they're very famous for playing, like you said,

all the characters playing the women. Some of the best laughs you will get watching Flying Circus or when Terry Jones plays like the crack, the crackly old English ladies. Right. They're like Brian's mom. Yeah, yeah, and Life of Brian, did you finally watch it? I did.

I watched it again this morning. Yeah, it's a good movie. I woke up at like 7.30 and watched Life of Brian. Do you watch? Right. Brian. I could pay for this. Yeah, I did have that moment, actually.

Ordered room service. It was wonderful. So they all kind of fell into their specialties a bit, though. Terry Jones would, he could play the middle class gentleman and the great old English bag lady type. Cleese and Chapman were the tallest. John Cleese was 6'5.

Graham Chapman was 6'2. So they often played authority figures or barristers or policemen or sort of the tufts. They were a little more imposing. Palin could do anything he wanted at any time. He was probably the most versatile. And then Eric Idle, he did the feminine ladies really well. Salesman, he was good at salesman.

Yeah, he was, for me, when it comes to like word play, he was kind of the best at that. But they all had their strengths. And who was it, Gilliam, that said they were like a molecule? Yeah, they fit together like a molecule. Like if you take any one and as we'll see, actually, a couple have been taken from the group here there over time, it's just not the same.

It just doesn't quite work. And it's not because there was a star or a leader. And that's probably one of the strengths of Monty Python is there wasn't a star or a leader. It was just this random assemblage of guys, including an animator. Like who would have guessed like, yes, we've got to have the animator too.

That came together to form this thing that had never been seen before and really hasn't been seen since. Yeah, so it ran. The Flying Circus ran for four seasons only. Cleese left after season three. And like we said, the fourth season was just called Monty Python. I think it only had about half a dozen episodes.

And for Python fans, everyone kind of says like, yeah, that fourth season, you take Cleese away. It's just not the same. But it didn't hit in America until later, thanks to syndication. And in 1974, in Dallas, Texas of all places, on KEPA, is anyone from Dallas? No?

I'm going to say KEPA, because I can't read my own handwriting. And you have to get away with it. That's where it debuted in the United States. And then it got picked up all over the country here and there. I remember on Georgia, on GPTV, when I was a kid, I was like 10, 11 years old. And I was exposed to British comedy by watching Benny Hill and Flying Circus.

And then later on, I got into other things, like Faulty Towers and Blackadder and all that good stuff. But yeah, it was all of a sudden, Americans caught on. And so they said, well, we should make movies then. And Americans caught on? You said 1974, right? Yeah. That was the last year that they had a TV show.

They've been trying to crack the American market for years, and it just wasn't happening. And they've basically given up hope. And then once it started to catch on in America, and they already had a pretty good cult following in the UK, once that American component came in, they were like, yeah, we should keep doing this. Let's try a movie.

And they already had one movie under their belt. It was called, and now for something completely different, right? Yeah, and it was a little weird. What they did was they literally took sketches that they had already done in front of the live studio audience for Flying Circus. They recreated those sketches on a studio stage,

and it was a sketch movie. It was like Kentucky Fried movie or something like that. And it didn't work so great. I think their best movies were the ones where they actually had a story to the thing. Well, we'll get to the movies. Everyone knows what they are. Sure.

It didn't do very well. No, it wasn't a huge hit. And it was made, again, for America. It'd be like, hey, America audience, just check this out. So it was yet another reason they'd kind of given up on America. But so America comes into the fold, and they're like, yes, let's try to make a movie. Yeah, and Cleese had left, but he was obviously in the movie.

So he didn't leave bitterly. He said that he was, I'll go and read his quote here. He said that he wanted to be a part of the group, but he didn't want to be married to them, because that's what I felt like. I began to lose any kind of control over my life. And I was not forceful enough in saying no. And he also had a couple of things

he wasn't wild about in the show, and he felt like he wasn't being listened to. So he ended up leaving, but was still like friends with the guys and wanted to do the movies for sure. Sure. He also said that he was the one who had to work with Graham Chapman during Graham Chapman's alcoholic phase.

He said that he was writing with Graham Chapman, who I didn't know, that he was gay, and he was out. And this is 1969, early 1970s. It hadn't been very long before that the UK had chemically castrated Alan Turing for being gay. And this guy is out and for gay rights even, actually. Yeah. Graham Chapman, that was part of his philosophy.

He was like, you know what, let's put it right in their faces and see what they think about it. Yeah, exactly. So Cleese was like, Graham Chapman was he had a huge, huge problem with alcohol during the time that they were making money, Python. And Cleese was the one who had to work with him because they were buds from the Cambridge days.

And he said that combined with the group not listening to him and feeling like it was taking over his life, he's like, I'm out. So after the third season, Cleese left. But that was about the time when they decided that they were going to go try to make the Holy Grail. That's right. Money, Python, and the Holy Grail.

Yeah. Anyone ever seen that little movie? I think joke for joke, like blazing saddles and Holy Grail are in an eternal race to see pound for pound what the funniest movie of all time is, in my opinion. Yeah. So you like Holy Grail more than Life of Brian? Yeah.

Yeah, same here. I mean, I love Life of Brian, but just the sheer amount of laughs and jokes in Holy Grail is astounding. Yeah. So they had a tiny little budget for Holy Grail. They didn't have money being thrown their way. And Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam co-directed, which is a little weird.

And Terry Jones later would say that I think like a kind of annoyed Gilliam. So we ended up alternating days. Monday, Terry Jones would direct. Tuesday, Terry Gilliam would direct. Sort of a weird way to go about things. A terrible, terrible way to direct a movie. And they filmed in Scotland.

And it was just a problematic shoot. The weather in Scotland, if you've ever been there, it's just like it is here. It's wonderful. It was very much a hardship shooting in Scotland. They had a bunch of problems with the budget. They didn't have what they needed. No, but that led to some pretty awesome jokes.

Oh, yeah. Go ahead. So the idea of King Arthur riding around on an invisible horse while his squire follows him clapping together coconuts, that was because they didn't have any money for horses for the movie. So they were forced to come up with this awesome joke, which I mean, it's funny when you first see it,

and then it's funny when you're sitting there eating spaghetti two days later, and you think about how nuts that would be in real life. But that came out of these budget constraints that they had. They also had trouble raising money in, I think, finishing funds, so they had some very famous bands invest in the movie. George Harrison had always been a champion.

He later would invest. Actually, he created a production company to make Life of Brian. But for Holy Grail, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, yeah, right? Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Genesis all invested 20,000. But why is Genesis getting a laugh? This is like Peter Gabriel Genesis, not invisible touch. Hey, hey, hey.

There's nothing wrong with Phil Collins Genesis fan. Nothing wrong. I can have you thrown out. I'm up by and stage. I knew you were going to say that. I bet I've offended Josh with that. I think he gets a bad rap unfairly. Sure he does.

He's not like Sammy Hagar. Well, you want to know something funny? My wife, Emily, loves Van Hagar more than David Lee Roth Van Halen. And she's proud of it. She's like, oh, man, put on that song right now. We're talking about world issues and the world's not right. And yeah.

And I was like, where are we going? I hear Janet Varney laughing in the background. Best laugh in the world. Yeah, so anyway, Van Hagar. And I don't know, never mind. Yeah. Genesis starring Phil Collins. I think that's where we left off.

That's right. It was Phil Collins who got everybody else to invest. Probably so. That's a made up fact. In the movie, Michael Palin plays the most roles. He plays 12 different characters. He played Sir Galahad, played the soldier who argues about swallows.

Remember that great scene? He plays Dennis, the peasant. He plays a mud villager singing Camelot Night, the right head of the three headed night. The king of the swamp castle, a wedding guest at the swamp castle, brother Maynard's assistant, brother Maynard. He was the main night who says, meh.

And he played one of the French taunting knights. Terry Gilliam played the, I'm sorry, Graham Chapman actually played the fewest because he was King Arthur. And as in Life of Brian, they didn't want to overuse him as the lead character. So he played King Arthur, the voice of God, the hiccuping guard, and the middle head of the three headed night. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up

sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart

radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. So that's Holy Grail. The next movie, from this point forward, Holy Grail is just like a hit, right? Everybody loved it. It's the Holy Grail of comedy, if you will. So they're like, OK, we'll go off and do our own things.

Because one of the things that characterize these guys as individuals was they always had their own work. And it didn't necessarily have anything to do with comedy. Like Eric Idle, all he does is comedic acting. But he's got his own stuff, too. Michael Palin got into making travel documentaries for the BBC. That was his thing.

Terry Jones opened a brewery, Penrose Brewery, in Hertfordshire, which I'm saying how it's spelled. So in the UK, it's probably like Channingham or something. It's how you pronounce it. And then John Cleese, strangely, formed a company that created training videos for business, not funny ones, from what I understand either. Was he in those?

I don't know. I don't know. There's no way if he was in those that they weren't funny, even if he was trying to be serious. He's like, please, stop laughing. Well, I'd love to see that. He's very serious. He's about industrial safety.

The emergency exits are behind and across. Well, he was kind of deadpan like that. That was sort of his thing. Yeah, whether he liked it or not, he was funny. And of course, that's much later. Their second, or I guess their third movie, their second narrative film in 1979 was The Life of Brian, which I watched this morning.

To me, Terry Jones kind of steals that movie as Brian's mother. Every scene he is in, he just walks away with. And that movie came about from a press conference from Holy Grail. People were asking, what's your next thing going to be? What's your next movie? And as a joke, Eric Idle said, Jesus Christ,

Lust for Glory. And that sort of got the seeds started that they should maybe go to biblical times since they did medieval times. Right. So when they started writing this movie, Jesus actually became a smaller and smaller and smaller figure character, I should say, in the movie.

And it became about Brian, this guy who's mistaken for the Messiah at the same time he's born on the same day as Jesus. But he's most decidedly not the Messiah. If you haven't seen it, it's definitely worth seeing it. It's still hilarious. It's just Holy Grail, Life of Brian, in my opinion. Full frontal in that movie, too.

Yeah. Yeah. Great Chapman. He's, yeah. Yep. Good. Good. Good.

There's nothing more to be said about it. Nope. So because it was about Jesus, even though it wasn't at all about Jesus, of course it got banned in several places by people who hadn't even seen the movie, had no idea really what it was about. That's what we do in America. Right.

And Norway. Norway and seven American states banned it. And you can probably take a pretty good stab at which American states banned it. It's like the South and then something random like Idaho. Right. And then featuring Norway. I bet Georgia probably sadly banned it, I imagine, for sure.

Well, anytime you do a comedic take on biblical times, you're going to be in trouble. Sure. But if you watch the movie, it's not offensive. I'm not very touchy about stuff like that. But I was watching it, and I'm like, this actually isn't offensive at any point, really. You're not easily offended, though.

No. Unless you talk about Bill Collins. Unless you bring up Bill Collins. That's my button. And I love to push it. So the final film they made was called Monty Python's The Meeting of Life, 1983. Oh, wait.

Hold on. Hold on. I'm sorry. There's one other spectacular fact about the life of Brian. It won the jury award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979. That's true. I have an arrow, an asterisk, and three exclamation points pointing to that sentence.

Well, Meeting of Life did, too, then. Or did you mix it up? I mixed it up. Oh, no. I'm sorry. The asterisk didn't work. You needed one more arrow. In 1983, they released Monty Python's The Meeting of Life.

Which won the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival? Can you believe it? And it was, by this time, these were financial and critical successes. Like, everyone was on board the train. And it was another sketch movie. Very funny. I like the Meeting of Life.

But to me, still, the other narrative films are a little better. But of course, the very classic Every Sperm is Sacred, which is very funny. Because if you watch Monty Python, nothing was sacred about anything. They would take on Hitler and cannibalism and race and gay rights.

And nothing was sacred except Every Sperm, apparently. There is this really great article that a lot of us is based on, it's called The Beatles of Comedy by a guy named David Free. And he points out that it's sad that the word irreverent is overused these days. Because the literal sense of irreverent is the best way to describe Python,

that they didn't have automatic respect for anything. Which is a pretty good description, if you ask me. So Meeting of Life was the last official project they ever did together for a while. They, in 19, I guess in the late 80s, they got together and did a couple of live shows. They did one at the Aspen Comedy Festival. And then a couple of years ago, finally, did one,

well, they owed money for Spamalot, the great Broadway show. They were sued by one of the producers of Holy Grail. And because of Spamalot and were very famously owed about 800,000 pounds. They owed him 8,000, 8,000, 8,000 pounds. They lost. And they came out and said, we're going to get back together and do some shows for the money

so we can pay off this lawsuit. And everyone was delighted that they were going to do these 10 shows. They were one of their first reunion appearances in Aspen. They were being interviewed by Robert Klein. And Graham Chapman wasn't there. Because Graham Chapman died in 1989, one day before the 20th anniversary of the debut

of the Flying Circus, which is kind of cool. Yeah, he just couldn't hang on for one more day. And so Graham Chapman's not there. But they actually brought his ashes in an urn. And he's on the table during the interview. For those of you listening to this in the future at home, the ashes were kicked over. And Ted Danson thought it was really funny.

Yeah, I was like, is that Ted Danson? Totally Ted Danson. That guy's good. Have you seen Fargo Season 2? Yes. Mwah. Mwah. It's amazing.

You get money for that or anything? You're just plugging it. Oh, I'm just a fan. I got you. Love Danson. But that kind of typifies Monty Python. Nothing was sacred. They would take their dear, dear friend.

And well, obviously, they weren't his ashes. Let's get real. But they would pretend like they kicked him over on stage for a joke. Right. And it worked. It did. So they performed at the O2 Arena in England two years ago.

They did those 10 shows to get out of debt. And that was the last time they performed together. They say that's it. They're not going to do it again. And they were together for short years on TV, the Beatles of comedy. I know. It's pretty amazing.

So we're going to talk a little bit about how they worked. There have been a lot of interviews with the inside story with the guys. And they kind of all roundly say it was a very democratic process. Palin comes out and says, you know, Cleese was a little bit of the leader. He's a little forceful.

His presence, he was a large man. He could be very convincing when he wanted something. But he said, but in the end, it was very democratic. Like no one really wanted to be the leader. Right. Terry Jones kind of considered himself a bit of a leader just because he directed so much. Like he directed.

He co-directed the Holy Grail. But he totally directed the life of Brian and the meaning of life. So even still, I don't think he actually saw himself as like the leader of Monty Python. He was probably just the one who could get the attention of the other ones long enough to direct them, right? Yeah.

And they would fight and argue like, you know, get any group of creative folks together. And you're going to argue. But they said it was never about big things. They would argue about like the size of the chair and sketch. But not like the big picture stuff, which is pretty cool. And then everybody kind of had their own little niche that they brought to the table, like John and Graham were funny,

but also very angry and kind of bitter. Like you could tell that they were like the traditional English schoolboys who parents had like sent them off to school at age like eight and hadn't seen them since, you know, kind of thing. And then Terry Jones and Michael Palin were a little more like surreal, a little more whimsical. And then Eric Otto was very verbal, they said. Yeah.

He's my guy. Yeah, he's good. So good. So one of the big factors in their success was the freedom that they had with the BBC. But it was sort of a mixed bag. They had a lot of freedom to do what they wanted. But it is the BBC and it is on television.

So they would often battle them about words they could say with the censors, of course. And they were famously censored for using the word masturbation. Yeah, they were. In the, what was it? Masturbation. Well, Josh. In the, explain, Chuck.

In the summarized Proust competition, there was a game show that was, you had to summarize a Proust poem or a Proust short story in like 60 seconds or less. So they had this whole game show. And so they said, Strangling Animals, Golf, and Masturbation were his hobbies, right? And so originally the BBC was like, you can't say that.

Well, they recorded it anyway. And then the BBC went behind them and edited it out. So in the original version that was aired, it was Strangling Animals, which they left in, Golf, like a dead air for a second, and then a big laugh. And they said when they went back and watched it, they were like, this doesn't make any sense. What's so funny about golf?

So as far as their aim, it kind of depends on who you talk to. Terry Jones very much said that they were trying to subvert the establishment, and they were trying to make a statement and try to make some noise. Michael Palin said, I think that's kind of overrated. We were just trying to be funny as we could be. So I think it was probably, as always,

the truth is sort of somewhere in the middle there, with what they were trying to get accomplished. They also said that radio was a big influence, because they were from the generation where none of them, they didn't have TV until they were like 12 or 13 years old. So that theater of the mind that you get when you would listen to the radio as a kid,

and I know that not many people in this room can probably imagine that. But now we have podcasts that do that, which is wonderful. No, that really struck me that that was one of their big creative inspirations was being raised on radio. That they were forced to use their imaginations and that they managed to figure out

how to translate that into TV. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, and I mentioned Tenacious T and Kids in the Hall and these shows that would come along that would have Mr. Show especially, where each show would have sort of this weird theme that ran through it, but it was never like a statement. I mean, it would be like a watch of episode

The Addonite of Flying Circus where the theme was just a pig. And like in the very beginning, Graham Chapman just sits down and you hear this oink, and then they cut to a chalkboard of a bunch of pigs drawn and they just X out another one. And then just randomly through the episode, there would be a pig here or there, or someone else would sit on a pig and they would cut it

and do another one, meant nothing at all. But that and the animation, like then a pig would drop on Jesus's head and there would be a fart noise in the animation. And so they had this weird kind of theme, like that one was The Pig Show or whatever. And you very much see that like Mr. Show, they sort of had these little thematic elements

that tied it together. One other thing Mr. Show did very well that you can kind of say Python started was like blending one sketch into another. Like one would not end before the other one began. They just kind of crossed paths. And that was, I think pretty much they pioneered that. Yeah, and it could be done in a lot of ways.

Sometimes they literally ran into each other. Like you would have a thing with medieval knights and he would walk to the next set, which was like a modern day living room. Or it would end like I saw one where they did a little snapshot to close the sketch. And then they would pull back from that snapshot. And it's just a picture on the wall in the next sketch.

So they just had really clever ways of sort of tying it all together. It was very cool. They'd also sometimes run the credits in the middle of the show. Right. And then I'll run them again at the end. Like that's where they went in the middle of the show.

Yeah, or John Cleese would, it would like the show would stop as if it had been canceled. And Cleese would come on as a supposed member of the BBC to apologize for the content of the show in the middle of the show. And then someone would just come in like lasso him offstage. They go right into the next sketch.

Very cool. So they're also anachronisms, masters at juxtaposition. Sure, you know, everyone who's seen Holy Grail, it ends when modern day police show up and arrest not only the actors in the big battle scene, but the cast and crew. And they would shut the movie down.

So they would throw weird things like that in there, like the Picasso thing. Yeah, Picasso painting a painting, riding a bicycle while he's on the highway, the A29 highway just randomly. Yeah, or the Spanish Sincquisition being in a modern day household. Right.

And they were extremely smart, very, very well educated dudes. But if they were doing a project, they would also like do more research. They didn't just automatically know everything. And some of their best jokes came out of that research. Like when they were researching for the Holy Grail, they found that one of the common tactics

during medieval sieges was taunting the people who were trying to siege the castle, right? So that was actually done. Apparently verbatim in history. The other thing they learned in their research was that they did used to launch animals. We actually covered this in, I think our castles episode many years ago,

where they would launch animals. The idea, of course, they didn't cover this in the movie, but the idea was that they would be diseased animals, so it would actually have an effect other than just being really weird and disconcerting to see a cow come flying at you. But it would be like a cow that was very sick

and would get people sick when it exploded all over everyone. It was really gross. And lead to a plague in the castle, ending the siege. You know, Josh, starting your own business can be really difficult, but developing your online presence doesn't have to be, right? Right, because Google and Squarespace have teamed up

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and you'll get 10% off your first purchase. Google and Squarespace. Make it professional, make it beautiful. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles Stuff you should know. They felt no social dread. They were often described as little boys. This article from The Atlantic said,

they not only weren't afraid, they didn't know they should be afraid. So they kind of had this sweet, naive quality about them. Like, what's wrong with doing a sketch about Hitler and the Pope? Is that, should we not do that? I don't think it ever occurred to them that that was off limits. There's a really good example of that

in the sketch called The Undertaker Sketch, which I think is probably the funniest sketch they made. Let me set it up, though. John Cleese is this dude whose mother has recently died, and he comes to the funeral parlor where Graham Chapman is The Undertaker. And Graham Chapman kind of runs down the list of things they can do to John Cleese's mother.

Like, they can bury her, but if she's not dead yet, she'll be eaten up by worms and beetles, and it's quite shocking. Or they can just toss her in the Thames or something like that, right? Yeah. And then John Cleese, he's a little shocked, but it turns out he has his mother in a burlap sack next

to him, like he dragged her body to the funeral parlor, right? So what they're playing there is God Save the Queen. And everyone is reverently standing around. They stopped rioting because they started playing God Save the Queen. And any good Britisher will just immediately stop whatever they're doing and kind of piously stand there. The reason that they did God Save the Queen

was because Monty Python, all the guys in it, had this deep fantasy that one day the Queen would turn on the BBC and accidentally watch their show. And so they really hoped that the one thing that she tuned into was the Undertaker sketch, like the foulest sketch that they ever came up with. So that's kind of a nod to that desire. Yeah, and if you watch that sketch and you are uninformed,

you hear people start to boo and hiss a little bit, and let's have something decent. That's disgusting. And you're like, oh my god, the audience is turning on them. Like, they've gone too far. It was all planned, of course. The BBC was worried that the audience interrupted the show. Oh my god.

Oh, wow. Look who it is, everyone. It's Kevin Pollack. Thank you, Kevin. Wow. Did that just happen? Something's in the water. What's he doing here?

I don't know. That's a really good question. He's in the wrong place, clearly. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Kevin Pollack. I've been waiting to say that for years. So the BBC hated the Undertaker sketch for obvious reasons. They did not want it to air, but they said, all right,

we'll let you guys air it if we can put these plants in the audience to boo and hiss and yell and eventually come down and riot very awkwardly at the end. So that was the compromise. And they were like, yeah, pretty awkward. Long as the queen watches, right? Yeah. So sorry, where was Kevin Pollack really through me on?

Oh, when they got to movies, they never were allowed to cuss on the air. And when they got to movies, they could obviously do what they wanted to. But for the most part, they still refrained from actual curse words. Well, Brian has a few F-bombs. Yeah, a few.

But that's it. Right, three or four. It works, so they don't stand out. No, not much. But they found one part where something did stand out to them. They actually went back after they shot the movie and dubbed in instead of the C word. I'll let you guys figure that one out.

They put in cluts instead. John Cleese calls Graham Chapman a clutz because he screwed something up. I don't remember what it was. But they went back, not because of a sensor, they went back and edited it out. That's a really difficult sentence. Edited it out?

Because they thought that it kind of detracted from the overall joke, the larger picture. So they were self-referential. How about that? Yeah, I don't know about reverential, but they didn't curse much. We've got a couple of tidbits to end here. Yeah, well, not only were they influential in the world

of comedy, but they're part of pop culture now. Like, people say things like the nights you say ni, and no one expects a Spanish inquisition. It's worked its way into the fabric and the lexicon of pop culture. Python-esque is actually a word that's in the Oxford Dictionary now. It's official.

It's a real word. Spam, like spam email, named after the famous sketch. I wish we had the spam sketch. Well, you should have given me a heads up. I know. You guys have seen the spam sketch, right? Where they come in and everything spam, spam, spam on the menu, one of their great word play sketches.

But my favorite part of that sketch, it's not the weird fact that there's Vikings in there, or the weird fact that it stops halfway through, and there's a history lesson from Michael Palin. But it is when the sketch starts, are you looking it up? For no reason at all, lower the two main, I think it's Graham Chapman. Sorry, no.

They lower them into the scene from Wires and a sitting position into their chair for no reason whatsoever. It's just a diner scene, and then they just are lowered in sitting like this, and then sit in their chair. And then it starts. Yeah, and then it starts. And that's like the genius of Monty Python

for no reason whatsoever. And Python is a coding language, too, named after Monty Python. There's actually a fossil snake, a fossil river snake that lived 100 million years ago in what is now Australia, called Monty Python Oides River Slayensis. Nice work. It's named after Monty Python. And like you said, the guys all went on to do their own thing.

They were together very short time, made a huge, huge impact. What do you say, Palin did travel docs, among other things? Of course, Fish Called Wanda, we all saw and loved that. They still enjoy being together. I think John Cleese's wife said she loves her husband, and she's never seen him have as much fun and laugh as much as when he's with the boys, with the lads.

Yeah, it's very sweet. That is sweet. Here's a very sad thing I should mention. Just yesterday, Terry- Wait, wait, don't you think we should save this for the very end? To really bring him down? No, I'll wedge it in and then we'll try and make you laugh again. Terry Jones just announced yesterday he is suffering

from a rare form of dementia, and it's super sad. His mates have known about it for a while, and they've all kept it quiet. But it's a form of dementia where it renders him and able to speak, so they officially came out with the announcement just yesterday and said, Terry Jones won't be doing interviews anymore, and all the guys are making statements about it. They've known about this for a while.

It's been very sad to see. And now something funny? Now something completely different. So if you go to a UK funeral, you are probably very likely to be hit with the song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, actually. There was a survey done in 2014 of like 30,000 British funerals that found that that was the number one song played to them,

and it beat out... Invisible Touch? Nice. That'd be great. It beat out My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion, which is, can you imagine how offensive is that? Yeah. Being at a funeral and being subjected to that, just be like...

Yeah. You would rise from the grave and gag. And it's not, I've got nothing against Celine Dion or even that song, but that plus a funeral is just... I've got something against Terry in that song. I'll say it. You're a music snob. I am.

So we'll finish with this little tidbit. We might not know about Money Python, and it might not have never made it to the United States, if not for one Terry Jones. Because back in the day, it was common practice in the BBC, and I guess in the United States too, to erase over tapes of shows. Yeah, because they were expensive.

Yeah, they were pricey. And someone at the BBC literally called Terry Jones and said, they're about to erase over Flying Circus. Get down here now. Yeah. And what did he do? Terry Jones left the phone hanging, and the guy was like, hello, hello.

Did you hear what I just said? Terry! And little did he know Terry Jones was already on his way there, showed up while the guy was still on the phone shouting Terry into the phone. This is like 20, 30 minutes later. Terry Jones grabs the tapes, goes and pays for his own blank tapes, makes copies of them, and the legacy was secured.

That's right. So we have Terry Jones to thank for that legacy. And this unnamed person from the BBC who thought to call them, rather than just going ahead and erasing the tapes. That's right. You got anything else? No, do you guys want to sit here and watch Monty Python

click for like a half an hour? See if you can find the spam seriously. I found the spam. It's three and a half minutes long. Yeah, perfect. Oh, oh, great. We got three and a half minutes, right? All right, that would be a great way to close it out.

Those of you who have to PTS. OK, we bring you to close out this stuff you should know live episode at LA Podcast Fest, the Monty Python spam sketch. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, hey dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show,

Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app,

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