Monty Python's Flying Circus

The Flying Circus Revisited

First Pepperpot: Per’aps it’s from the zoo. Second Pepperpot: Which zoo? First Pepperpot: (angrily) ’Ow should I know which zoo it’s from. I’m not Doctor Bloody Bronowski! Second Pepperpot: Oo’s Bloody Bronowski? First Pepperpot: He knows everything. Second Pepperpot: Ooh, I wouldn’t like that, it would take all the mystery out of life. When the television goes on, the news announcer says, “Hello! Well, it’s just after eight o’clock, and time for the penguin on top of your television set to explode.” The first Pepperpot says, “’Ow did ’e know that was going to happen ?” and the man on the television responds, “It was an inspired guess.” Other than identifying the domestic setting for television and associating it primarily, though not exclusively , with women, the sketch also dramatizes viewers’ familiarity with television personalities in allusions to such programs as The Ascent of Man (television, 1973), hosted by Bronowski, or The Brains Trust (radio, 1941, and television, 1955–61). In the Flying Circus, not only do viewers talk to the box, but television personalities often talk directly to them and even occasionally leave the box to enter the home, another Python strategy for blurring lines between real and imaginary worlds and for situating the spectator in an indeterminate zone of meaning. The Flying Circus Revisited Monty Python’s Flying Circus continues to be rebroadcast, and videos and DVDs of all of the episodes have been released for consumer purchase. The series has maintained its cult status as new generations discover the Pythons. Books—biographies and critical studies —appear regularly by and on the individual members of 99 The Flying Circus Revisited the group. The Pythons appear in reunions and individually on television talk shows in the United States and elsewhere. The popularity of the series internationally contradicts the claim that comedy appeals exclusively to a national constituency , given the cultural and linguistic idiosyncrasy with which it is often associated. In 1989, reviewer Andrew Clifford wrote in anticipation of a BBC “Monty Python Special” and in response to a book on the Flying Circus, Monty Python is 20 years old. The team’s first show was broadcast on BBC2 on 5 October 1969. For a while the show languished on the BBC’s second channel . Seemingly watched only by those keen on a little extra Call-My-Bluff activity. Soon it had a cult following . . . . Twenty years on and the best of Monty Python still outshines its imitators in sheer comic inventiveness. No other comedians have inspired such a devoted, indeed virtually addicted following.71 In 1994, a Comedy Central Python-a-thon was described as “remarkably fresh.”72 And in 1998, at the Aspen Reunion of the group minus Chapman (d. 1989), the Flying Circus was lauded as “groundbreaking comedy and groundbreaking television . . . the group created countless quotable bits that have entered comedy history.”73 In 1998, reviewer Anna Mulrine, stressing the influential role of the Pythons, wrote in U.S. News and World Report, “Weaned on Pythons’ unorthodox blend of the surreal, the silly, and the cerebral, today’s comedians are looking to Python as they rebel against the formula of sitcoms, the convention of sitcoms, and the tired repetition of shows like Saturday Night Live. . . . Flying Circus marked a revolution in both form and content of American television as it had in Britain from 1969 through 1974.”74 This “revolution . . . in form and content” was not merely due to the range and vari100 Monty Python’s Flying Circus ety of topics introduced by the shows but due to the excessive and “cerebral” ways in which these topics were treated. The accepted world was turned on its head through hyperbole and reversal of expectations. The Pythons used these strategies of comedy to call attention to the role of institutions —medicine, psychiatry, the family, the state’s administration of social life, the uses and abuses of history, and especially the disciplining of the sexual body through existing social formations. Many sketches involve the diverse ways in which language , individual and social behavior, and physical appearance are wrenched from their conventional contexts. In the reiterative emphasis on bodily gesture through the Pythons’ stylized movement and animation, the Flying Circus highlighted the importance of gesture as a means of communicating knowledge often blocked in reigning channels of communication . Philosopher Giorgio Agamben has described the gesture as “always a gesture of not being able...