Last time, we learned about the fledgling careers of the pre-Python Pythons. They’d spent most of the 1960s as jobbing writer-performers, getting into the spirit of that decade and gently pushing against the standard boundaries of sketch comedy.

They were just waiting for an opportunity to positively smash those boundaries down.

Letting Loose

The appearance of Flying Circus was more like reaching a tipping point than igniting a revolution. We saw last time how the road to Python was littered with earlier efforts, each with different ideas, different styles, different combinations of writers and performers. It was almost as though the gods kept trying things out, continually rearranging the comedy furniture and looking to get things just right.

Even then, there was no eureka moment and the formation of the group had a certain element of coincidence about it. Things kicked off when Cleese was invited to do another show for the BBC in 1969. That automatically brought in Chapman, but Cleese was also keen to involve Palin, having enjoyed working together on How to Irritate People and watching Do Not Adjust Your Set. Upon being invited, Palin talked Cleese into bringing along his collaborators Idle, Jones and Gilliam. They were only able to accept the invitation in the first place because their own fledgling project had been delayed several months. ‘Never mind,’ they thought, ‘once this collaboration with Cleese is done, we’ll go back to it.’ Hence the Pythons didn’t go into Flying Circus regarding it as the ultimate culmination of all their experience and experimentation; it was just another show to work on.

Well, almost.

One thing was different from the off: Flying Circus was a show where the writers were in charge rather than producers or BBC management. Maybe it’s because the group had built up enough trust within the corporation. Perhaps the show’s late-night timeslot on a Sunday meant the grown-ups didn’t overly concern themselves with what the boys were up to. In any case, they unexpectedly found themselves granted a lot of licence. It seemed that drive they all shared to really push boundaries was finally being given a proper outlet.

Oddly enough, they weren’t sure at first exactly how to do it.

‘We didn’t really know what we wanted to do, we just knew what we wanted to avoid.’

– Eric Idle

‘We were never great theorisers. We discovered what we were going to do mainly by sitting down and seeing what came out on the sheets of paper at the end of the day.’

– John Cleese

Initially it was the Cambridge lads, Cleese and Chapman, who proved the more conservative ones. Their chums from Oxford – Jones and Palin – pushed to take full advantage of this freedom and make a really off-the-wall show. Chapman and Cleese, instinctively more structured (even if that structure did contain dead parrots and chocolate-covered frogs), required persuading. Thankfully, Oxford won that particular race. As Jones later put it: ‘… the others were still writing sketches with beginnings, middles and ends, and punchlines and things.’ They soon decided to put a stop to all that nonsense.

But something else lit a fire under the Pythons’ collective bottom. As they were busy writing their brave new show, Spike Milligan’s own new sketch show, Q5, was broadcast before anyone had even heard of Monty Python. The group was crestfallen. Q5 contained the kind of madcap, rule-breaking anarchism they were aiming for: sketches that tortured logic, broke the fourth wall, forewent punchlines completely. Their hero, Milligan, had pipped them to the post. What now?

There was only one thing for it. Outdo Milligan and keep pushing those boundaries harder than ever before.

The group also had an ace up their sleeve: Gilliam. He, along with Jones and Palin, argued for something Milligan didn’t have: a loose but definite structure akin to a stream of consciousness, with sketches overlapping and bleeding into one another. Again, the others weren’t initially keen on such an avant garde idea, but again Oxford (this time united with America) won out. The key was to use Gilliam’s animations. His surreal cartoons gave Flying Circus two important things:

1. A more elegant way to end sketches. Like Milligan, the Pythons had decided largely to forego punchlines, judging that they were too often more trouble than they were worth. But whereas Milligan’s sketches tended to simply stop (occasionally with characters looking to camera and appealing, ‘What are we going to do now?’), Python went one better by linking one sketch to the next, often via a Gilliam cartoon.
2. A highly distinct identity. Check any Monty Python merchandise, read any article about the group, or do an image search for them, and you’ll likely see a giant foot squashing people, a cartoon Gumby, a dancing nude statue, or a photo of W. G. Grace dressed up as God. Gilliam’s creations are instantly recognisable, giving Python the kind of brand recognition most artists would kill for.

‘Gilliam made us famous in America because he gave them what Americans love: tits and violence.’

– Eric Idle

Breaking (Some) Rules

What ultimately resulted from this freedom and experimentation? Flying Circus was absurd, surreal, irreverent and sometimes just plain silly, there’s no doubt about any of that, but it’s possible to be all of those things while still sticking to the rules of sketch comedy I described in an earlier article. As well as being inventive, to what extent did the Pythons break the rules when their baby was finally and inauspiciously delivered onto British screens that Sunday night in October?

There’s no denying that Flying Circus often flouts conventional elements of sketch comedy. As I’ve already mentioned, even that seemingly sacrosanct element, the punchline, was largely jettisoned in many sketches. As early as the third episode, they openly mock the very idea of punchlines in the Dirty Fork sketch when a title card announces the impending punchline (which, when delivered, causes the ‘audience’ to boo angrily). Overall structure is also at the Python’s mercy. No longer are sketches distinct entities neatly lined up, but rather they’re strung together to form a single, unending stream, or even overlap with each other. Watch, for example, the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch and you’ll notice that John Cleese struts past the background of the New Gas Cooker sketch, which appeared earlier in the same episode.

The show’s chaotic structure even hampers efforts to judge its conformance to another rule, namely duration. A sketch is conventionally one to five minutes in length. However, if a sketch overlaps with another sketch, when does it end and the other start? If it comes back later in the same episode, like the Spanish Inquisition sketch does (it actually returns something like six times in one episode) how long can we say that sketch lasts? Further confounding efforts is the Pythons’ habit of layering sketches on top of one another. Think of all those sketches featuring a spoof TV show that was actually a container for a series of smaller sketches and skits:

• It’s the Arts featuring the separate sketches Sir Edward Ross, Arthur ‘Two Sheds’ Jackson, and Picasso Painting on a Bicycle.
• Ethel the Frog describing the rise and fall of the Piranha Brothers in a series of interviews and studio commentary.
• Election Night Special featuring an array of studio-bound experts doing their skits, as well as cutaways to election results.

Sketches like these gave us not only some classic routines but also some prime examples of Python ignoring the rules. Not only did these they push beyond the usual time limits, but they even jumped between different locations. Again, this is conventionally something you don’t do in a sketch.

And yet, despite all this subversion of the form, the Pythons carefully considered everything they did and rarely broke convention just for the sake of it. No rule was chucked out thoughtlessly. Indeed some were respected throughout. For example, while the punchline was often given the elbow, the comic twist was not. Furthermore, a sketch classically has some kind of conflict, something there’s no shortage of throughout Flying Circus. It comes in various levels of extremity, from people failing at finding a particular type of cheese to people attacking others with fresh fruit and getting shot, but sketches generally feature characters being prevented from getting what they want. Sometimes the Pythons’ abject silliness allows them to dispense with conflict and make us laugh simply by presenting a hilariously silly idea – think about The Semaphor Version of Wuthering Heights or The Man with a Tape Recorder up His Nose – but I’d argue these are often skits rather than sketches.

The group were also careful not to let their experimentation end up diluting the comedy. A Python sketch rarely throws a load of stuff at the wall and sees what sticks. The Pythons at their best respect the idea of having a single attack – that is, one clearly defined situation from which the laughter is derived. Consider, for example, the Marriage Guidance Counsellor sketch where the timorous Palin brings his stunning wife – played by Carol Cleveland – to Idle’s counsellor, only for Idle and Cleveland to immediately sneak off behind the partition for a bit of how’s your father. Now, the Pythons were notorious for playing women themselves, but in this case they cast the gorgeous Cleveland as the wife. Why? Why not have a Python play the wife? Answer: because seeing one of the lads dressed up as a ‘gorgeous’ woman would have conflicted with the actual attack of the sketch. If we’d watched Idle start lusting instead after, say, Chapman in drag, the two ideas would have been fighting each other, leaving us questioning whether, in the world of the sketch, it was supposed to be actual woman or just a man in drag.

Conclusion

So, there you have it. Far from striking out of blue and throwing out the rulebook completely, the Python team benefited from an apprenticeship in the world of comedy at a time when experimentation was encouraged. That gave them valuable experience and a familiarity with the rules, a familiarity that enabled them to judge when to ignore conventions and when to follow them.

Anyway, I suppose I’d better think of a funny punchline for this article…