Men in Tights

By Michael Black
Contributing Writer

I recall a Sunday night in 1974. My brother sat me down in front of the tube (TV’s actually had tubes then) and dialed up (TV’s actually had dials then) KFME, the educational station in Fargo. Some bizarre, not at all like Looney Tunes cartoons scrolled across the screen to the tune of The Liberty Bell by John Philip Sousa, finished off with a big boot coming down and going SPLAT. Then some nearly unintelligible Brits began saying and doing all manner of silly things. I laughed my ass off. This was my introduction to Monty Python‘s Flying Circus. It was silly and profane and made you think a bit and you felt like you were sophisticated because you (sort of) got it and it was from England, the BBC. And now, lo these near forty years later I found myself sitting with my son watching these same silly Britishers in Monty Python and the Holy Grail doing the same sort of silly things and laughing OUR asses off. What a strange world it is… Fast forward to 2005 and see Eric Idle accepting multiple Tony Awards for, basically, putting the silliness to music. Spamalot was his baby, really. All the other Pythons were either too busy or disinterested or both to bother with his inspiration. Now the show is touring the country yet again, selling lots of tickets, making millions of dollars and perpetuating the silliness down through generations accustomed to YouTube tripe for their “humour”. Silly indeed…
Monty Python’s Spamalot is a kind of greatest hits “out-take”—cherry picked scenes from the feature length film, the troupe’s second. Holy Grail was filmed in 1974 in five weeks(!) on a budget of $687,000 or approximately Tom Cruise‘s catering tab. Much of the funding came from the rock groups Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull, not to mention Sir Elton John. One of the funniest aspects of the movie was due to the fact that because they could not afford horses and wranglers, they elected to have the nobleman’s porters clack coconuts together behind them—a technique early British westerns used to simulate the clopping of hooves. The Knights, with their hands out in front of them as if to hold reins, two-legged galloped (silly walked?) before them. To give you an idea how enduring The Cult of Python is, in 2007 their fans set a Guinness World Record for coconut clacking in Trafalgar Square: 5,567. The absurdity is catching, apparently. The German film title translated to The Knights of the Coconut while in Japan it was The Holy Sake Cup. How can two countries who nearly took over Earth be so silly? The film was made in Scotland under relentless rain and at the end of the day the cast and crew raced back to their hotel to see what lucky 40% of them would actually get hot water showers. Graham Chapman, who portrayed Sir Arthur, was pretty much drunk throughout the filming and had to be fed his lines constantly. Two weeks before the shoot, the Scottish Department of the Environment pulled their permission to use their castles because it was “…inconsistent with the dignity and fabric of the buildings…” which were, ironically, built for killing and torturing. Hail Britannia!

Spamalot is the product of Eric Idle’s relentless quest to make a musical Python product. The most musical of the group, he headed The Ruttles (aka The Pre-Fab Four), a tongue-in-cheek look at The Beatles a la Spinal Tap. He pestered the other members of the troupe until finally deciding to just go it alone. In its initial broadway run it seated over 2 million people and made in excess of $175M. Directed by Mike Nichols, it was nominated for 14 Tony Awards. The other Pythons have a wide range of feelings about Spamalot though they all agree on one thing: they like the money it is making for them. When he heard of some of the grousing by original Python members Idle commented, “I’m making them money, and the ungrateful bastards never thank me. Who gave them a million dollars each for Spamalot?” The only American in the group, Minneapolis’ own Terry Gilliam (director of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Time Bandits) said, “It helps with the pension fund, and it helps keep Python alive. As much as we’d like to pull the plug on the whole thing it carries on - its got a life of its own.” Terry Jones, who directed three of the Python movies, was one of the early—Who Said Ni—Pythons.  But after its boffo opening on Broadway he stated, “Well, I thought it was terrific good fun. It’s great to see the audience loving it.” Funny what a few millions will do to a fellow’s point of view. Michael Palin knows what side of the crisp Spamalot is buttering. “We’re all hugely delighted that Spamalot is doing so well. Because we’re all beneficiaries! It’s a great show. It’s not ‘Python’ as we would have written it. But then, none of us would get together and write a ‘Python’ stage show. Eric eventually ran out of patience and said, ‘Well, I’ll do it myself then.’ He sent us bits and songs and all that and we said, ‘Yeah, that’s all right, have a go.’ But its success is so enormous that it took us all by surprise, including Eric, and now we’re just proud to be associated with it, rather pathetically.” The last words belong to my favorite Python, Basil Fawlty…er..no..John Cleese: “And in the end I think Spamalot turned out splendidly. It’s had a tremendous run. I defy anyone to go and not have a really fun evening. It’s the silliest thing I’ve ever seen and I think Eric did a great job.”

The skits set to music include some of my favorites. First and foremost in “Taunting French Guard,” with lines like “I don’t want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries,” how can you not like it? And what’s not funny about the corpse collector during the plague in the skit “He Is Not Dead Yet”?—“I‘m not dead. I‘m getting better. I don’t want to go on the cart. I feel fine. I think I‘ll go for a walk. I feel happy.”? Or a large, wooden trojan rabbit built to sneak the noblemen into the castle, only they forget to get inside? How about fighting The Evil Rabbit with The Holy Hand Grenade? The Black Knight (…ok, we’ll call it a draw…), The Knights Who Say Ni! (…Ni!…). But I tell too much. I should not go spoiler on you here but I will add this: “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” from another Python movie, Life of Brian, closes the show. Ok, I’m gonna’ spoil that film. That was the song sung by Brian and his cohorts as they hung on the cross. That’s all I’m sayin’…except that the song was written by Eric Idle. What did you expect, The Spanish Inquisition? “Our chief weapon is surprise…surprise and fear…our two weapons are fear and surprise and ruthless efficiency…our three weapons…I’ll come in again.”
Monty Pythons Flying Circus.

I hate musicals. I think it stems from seeing Richard Harris break into song about every three minutes in Camelot, circa 1967 (or the fact I had to shell out $80 a seat in NYC in the mid-80‘s). Those were my formative teen years and gender confusion was at a fever pitch. Hormones raging. Girls beguiling. Then un-beguiling. So I have a natural aversion to productions that randomly start singing songs for no apparent reason (and, really, is there any reason to just break out in song unless you are a birdie?), men in tights, etc. Except for Oliver. By that time I was confident in my manhood and the thespians I was hanging out with dug it too so I scored. (…More? You want more?…) I gave tickets to Spamalot to my sister and her husband for the Fargo Dome show and didn’t plan on going at all. Now? Who am I to say “Ni!”?

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