I first saw a "Monty Python" episode in the Summer of 1974 on KQED-9, a PBS station out of San Francisco. As I watched the show, I was helping my parents pack for our move from California to Florida. I got to see maybe one more before the move.
The one thing I remember about it was that it was the episode where Michael Palin played a man set to "jump the English Channel". He did indeed try, and fell some 26-27 miles short of Calais, France. There was another part which made wicked fun of David Frost, then the most popular British person on American television. The guy playing Frost (Eric Idle) was a famous celebrity booby who took credit for other people's work and sat at a restaurant saying "Super! Simply Super" over and over again.
Parts of these shows were silly, then absurd or wickedly sarcastic. No quarter was given to any sacred cow, and continuity was for small minds. There was more behind some of the material than just getting laughs, but it couldn't take itself seriously enough to be a "message" show. There were a lot of the slang phrases like "sod", "twit", "stupid git" and such. I had had a taste of Marty Feldman's humor on various variety shows, but this seemed even less tame.
I first thought "Monty" was a sort of sit-com. But all the British sit-coms I had seen before this (like "Doctor In the House" with Barry Evans) were much like the American variety of standard comedic fare with lots of 'safe' jokes and predictable plots built around well-groomed and handsome or pretty young people dealing, say in a hospital, with crotchety but non-threatening authority figures in a set-up/joke environment.
This didn't prepare me for Monty Python.
I didn't fall instantly for the show , although I didn't have much chance to take it all in. "The Pythons" weren't carried regularly for a couple years down on the Miami-PBS channel. I did see more of them late in 1975--an "ABC Late Night" Special showed some of their sketches from the four seasons they had on the BBC in an out-of-order, bowdlerized way. I found out later that the comedy team sued ABC --successfully-- for the way they messed with the raunchy and biting parts of the show, such as the famous "Nudge, Nudge" sketch, pictured above, with Eric Idle and Terry Jones, which was apparently tamed by a ABC narrator to prevent the slightest American viewer outrage.
Come the regular featuring of the "Monty Python" shows that ran on Saturday Nights on PBS and I was hooked on them. Not all the shows were great, but enough of them were terrific to make up for any lapses.
"Saturday Night Live" debuted on NBC and I found that ensemble funny. But "Monty Python" was edgy and a touch cerebral and , best of all for me, British. It was like watching people from another planet in the solar system, tearing into all the layers of convention that this "Planet England" had built up over centuries and then knock them all down in two or three minute skits.
I soon acquired an 8-track tape (yes, I really am old) of the group's live performance at New York's City Center. The recording had most of the best stuff the group had done on the tube: Karl Marx and Chairman Mao competing on a game show; the legendary Dead Parrot sketch ("This....is an ex-parrot!!!); a good humor man selling an albatross; Australian academics from the University of Wallomalew, and all named Bruce, singing about all great Western philosophers being hopeless drinkers; a man who goes to a clinic to have an argument; the send up of homophobia, "The Lumberjack Sketch" and John Cleese announcing a wrestling match with only one competitor and the late and great Graham Chapman as a policeman busting up a confectionery factory that produces such delectables for their assortments as "crunchy frog" and "cockroach cluster" and a candy that shoots steel arrows through both cheeks as the unsuspecting eater bites into it. Soon, my friend and fellow Python-fan Brook and I were walking up and down the hallways of our high school, hawking copies of the Naples High Spirit Newspaper by shouting out "Albatross! Get yer Albatross! Albatross!" OK, maybe you had to be there, but it was fun.
I decided this was the best show on television. I may be accused of a sort of adolescent prelapsarianism--thinking something was better because it came before my "fall" into adult jadedness--but reviewing what I saw has not diminished my admiration for the show.
A couple years of "Monty Python" and in 1978 I got to see "MP and the Holy Grail" for the first time. It completely filled my expectations for what a film with these six sharp and funny men could do. There are few comic films I have ever enjoyed so much even though I saw them first all alone. One was Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove". The other was "The Grail". I wish I had seen it when it first came out in 1975 and played at Naples Kon-Tiki Theater but I hadn't realized how good these guys were just yet. I made up for it later by cassette audio taping the movie (an early version of VHS or Beta, though not as visually stimulating) and listening to the "movie" many times. I had the dialog down cold. You have to really like a movie to do that and I did.
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