I was enjoying the painfully funny Meaning of Life tonight and realized that I simply love these guys. Together they were the funniest troupe ever; separately they’ve all done some great stuff as well.
But my main question is this: who’s your favorite Python and why?
Obviously it’s a very tough call, but mine would definitely be Michael Palin. To me he seems the most versatile and affable. Ask me five years ago and I’d have said Eric Idle or John Cleese.
Palin’s the understated one that everyone seems to overlook. But keep an eye on Mike as you watch The Meaning of Life, Holy Grail, Life of Brian and Flying Circus and you’ll see where my admiration comes from. The guy’s a quiet genius.
All six of the guys are clearly brilliant in various ways. But who’s your fave?
I’m gonna register a vote for Terry Jones, not so much for what he did on the show (He was mainly a support player) as for his amazing BBC miniseries, The Crusades. Yeah, Cleese is funnier and Idle has that whole “music hall” thing going for him, but I wish I’d had Terry Jones as a history teacher back in the day!
I’d vote for Graham Chapman, mainly for the movies. Also his autobiography was brilliant. Then Terry Jones. Although Terry Gilliam has achieved most since the show finished, I didn’t think his animations were especially good.
John Cleese loses about a million points for suing the Evening Standard after they said he’s not funny any more (he isn’t; he makes most of his money from adverts and corporate videos). Not to mention his painfully bad Sainsbury’s adverts. The first link includes the original article:
Anyone who sues the Evening Standard gains an immediate 2 million points in my book, funny or not.
However, Palin gets 2 million and 1 votes for all the patient humanity, tolerance and gentle humour he shows in his travelogue series, so he gets my vote.
I don’t know if I have a favorite member of the Python troupe, but I have the DVD set of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and I think that the show went downhill somewhat during its final season, after John Cleese departed. Most of my favorite skits have John Cleese in them somewhere, so I guess I’d vote for him, with Michael Palin a close second for his rendition of “The Lumberjack Song”.
I love travelling the world vicariously with Michael Palin. Don’t know if his latest journey–Sahara–was particularly tough on him, or if it’s just that he’s getting older, but he looked a little worse for wear in the desert.
I rather like Burmese pythons, as they’re docile and rather large. They get to be too large, though – 30 feet or so – and so they require large housing and a great amount of food. Reticulated pythons are out, as they’re both obscenely large and nasty in their temperament.
Ball pythons are extremely docile, and always a good standby, but they can be very picky eaters. Terribly frustrating at times.
I never really thought of it before. I love Gilliam as a director, but I was never a big fan of his animations for Python. Jones gets bonus points for being in the skit I nicked my screen name from. Chapman and Cleese get points for being the writers of The Dead Parrot sketch. I was never a huge fan of Idle during the series, but I loved his work in the films (plus he wrote the song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”). And of course Palin was a favorite throughout the series and the films, from the meek man who wants to become a lion tamer (until he learns what lions are) to Ken Shabby, the man who cleans public lavoratories (and when he gets promoted, they’ll give him a brush).
Tough, tough call. I’m gonna say it’s a tie between Cleese and Palin. Palin, as had been said, can be very versatile and has a bit of the everyman quality about him, while Cleese has written some of my favorite skits - The Argument Clinic, The Dead Parrot, and I don’t know if he wrote the skit but he was the Minister of Silly Walks.
As a side note, I have a book about Python (forget the name, The First 25 Years of Monty Python or something like that) and in the book it mentions that the Pythons rarely ad-libbed during filming of the TV show or movies. I believe it was Cleese, who could recall only 2 ad-libs (and it’s been a while so this is all from my rusty memory). One was during a Gumby sketch, when Pailn comes in and announces, “My brain hurts!” Cleese (who admits that he and Palin were the two who were easiest to break character and start laughing) started the ad-lib by beginning to undo Palin’s pants. Palin then ad-libs, “No, the brain up here!” and points to his head.
The other a-lib that was remembered is also by Palin and made it into The Meaning of Life. When Death comes to the dinner party and takes everyone away for eating the salmon mousse (did I spell that right?), on the way out Palin says, “Hey! I didn’t have any mousse!” The scene cuts directly after that line because everyone started laughing.
(There, does that cover it?)