Monty Pythons Terry Jones on how the legendary groups work was almost lost to history.
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Jones was also a poet and a member of Londons renowned Poet Society.
God knows he had better things to be doing than speaking with me.
And yet he did so anyway, for hours.
More and more of the comedy-writing greats I talked with for my two interview books are now gone.
Two down, four to go,announced John Cleesethis morning via Twitter.
A bridge to another time in comedy and television and movies seems to be passing quickly.
What follows is my interview with Terry Jones, which has never before appeared online.
He was a very,very naughty boy.
Better get a bucket.
My family and I were sitting around a table.
My granny asked all of us, Does anybody want more custard?
I raised my hand, but instead of giving her my plate, I handed over my table mat.
She poured the custard all over the mat.
Everybody turned to me and said, You silly boy!
What did you do that for?
It taught me at a very young age that comedy is dangerous business.
People do not become angry if youre writing a tragedy and you dont do a good job.
Did you always know you wanted to write?Yes, since about the age of seven.
I was always writing poetry, which tended to be terribly gloomy.
I think my family got worried at some point.
I was a compulsive writer.
Ive got essays I wrote when I was very young; my granny kept them.
I used to write poems and huge, long essays for that age.
Just writing, all the time.
That gave me a great base.
It gave me confidence.
But Mr. Martin left, and it was then that I began to hear different things from teachers.
I would be told, You cant make a living as a writer.
The best you’ve got the option to hope for is to become a teacher.
Ive always found that lovely.
Its a somewhat similar theory with comedy.
Theres a magical element to it.
Where did he make that connection?
And how did he make it work?
In the end, you get a laugh.
Now that I think about it, theres another similarity between poetry and comedy: distillation.
Both have to be distilled.
It was tremendously difficult to keep up that level of quality with Python.
We made it a point to end sketches when they might have just been beginning on other shows.
Writing was very serious business; we took it very seriously.
But it did take a lot out of us.
This reminded me of something I once read about the 1960s vocal group the Mamas & the Papas.
I think thats true.
The six of us produced a harmony that was somebody else.
Wed write together, and we were almost writing for this seventh voice.
There was always that image of another voice that was there.
It was the Python voice, really.
And it couldnt quite be duplicated with any other combination or alone.
With Python, we had a lot of different minds at work, and we worked very well together.
They were a bit puzzled.
We had to speed up the shows.
I think people got used to it by the end of the first season.
There was a great doubt whether the BBC would actually commission another series [season].
We were lucky they did, actually.
They hated the show until they were told it was funny and it was good.
We were the only people writing for us, so we had a certain strength.
We knew what we could perform.
We knew what we couldnt.
We wrote a sketch [for the third series] called The All-England Summarize Proust Competition.
Graham [Chapman] was playing a contestant.
The BBC edited out masturbation.
Keep in mind, the BBC was okay with strangling cats.
But masturbation was definitely out.
If you watch the edited sketch, theres a lag time after Graham says golf.
His lips move but you cant hear him say masturbate.
And then theres a huge laugh from the live audience.
But this is puzzling to the home viewers.
It sounds like the studio audience is laughing at strangling animals.
It becomes even stranger.
The first draft ofHoly Grailwas much longer.
The first half took place in the present day.
But we ultimately decided to have the entire film only take place in the Middle Ages.
ForLife of Brian,we had a few scenes that were cut.
We spent a lot of time on rewrites.
Not so much forMeaning of Life,but certainly for the first two films.
We were talking earlier about how comedy is often created by bringing disparate ideas together.
A gigantic man, dining in a fancy restaurant, vomits until he explodes.[Laughs.]
Well, for that one, I just sat down and wrote a sketch in the worst possible taste.
In fact, at the top of the paper it read: Sketch in the Worst Possible Taste.
No one liked it.
That wasnotthe time to do it.
It was decisively rejected.
I think he spotted that the waiter could be very funny.
Thats the only sketch I ever co-wrote with John.
The Mr. Creosote scene took four days to shoot.
On the fifth day, a wedding took place in the ballroom where we shot it.
That wasnt a set!
The fake vomit was Russian salad dressing, and some other food ingredients.
By the fifth day you’re free to imagine the smell.
And the poor people getting married had to come into that stench.
Not a good way to start off the married life.
Fellow Python Eric Idle has calledMeaning of Lifea kind of a punk film.
Do you agree with that?I think so.
I think that might be accurate.
But it was really no different from how we always wrote.
We werent concerned with making anyone but ourselves laugh.
And thats clear in the Mr. Creosote sketch.
I mean, we certainly werent pandering with that sketch!
Meanwhile, Graham Chapman is dressed as a drag queen.
And theres another character wearing an elephant head.
I pitched it and was shocked after it was voted in.
I was totally surprised by that vote.
Each of us had different styles of comedy.
Mike and I would write, I suppose, zany sketches.
John would write bits more having to do with character and human nature.
This sketch was silly, with no greater purpose.
So it was sort of extreme, and we didnt always agree on extremes.
But when we did fight, it was always over the material.
It was never personal.
Or mostly never personal.
So we smuggled out the tapes and recorded them onto a Philips VCR home system.
For a long time, these were the only copies of Pythons first season to exist anywhere.
If these were lost, they were lost for good.
This happened quite often with BBC comedy shows from the sixties.
It happened withSpike Milligans showfrom the late 1960s,Q5.All those shows are gone or mostly gone.
They were taped over to record sporting events.
And it happened, as you were just saying, with many BBC comedies.
I would guess around one hundred pounds per tape reel.
Python wouldnt have been discovered in America.
And we might not have made as many series for TV.
And we may not have created any movies.
It goes to show how tenuous history is.
It can go in any direction.
If you might make people laugh, head in that direction.
If nobody laughs … well, thats not good news.
Head in the opposite direction.
