John Cleese, Eric Idle... and Me!

"They told us to 'just have fun'... but then they wouldn't let us out." - Eric Idle

Way back in the spotty days of my teenage-hood, I wanted to be a comedy sketch writer, and I pursued that dream with some alacrity. I wrote material for my high school drama club that shamelessly ripped off Steve Martin and Saturday Night Live, and spun off sketch and improv groups out of various restaurants and resorts that I worked at. I always received tremendous joy writing comedy. Cracking oneself up is a great way to spend one's day.

Though I had some success in the New York comedy scene, it never translated into big bucks, or little bucks, or big cents, or any sense. I watched the careers of my idols and felt as though they were dwelling within a completely different reality than I, a million miles away. But something happened last Tuesday night that has comforted me considerably. Maybe the distance between us wasn't uncrossable.

Not because I might become a successful comedy sketch writer-- but because John Cleese and Eric Idle came to Glendale.

Two weeks ago, my wife called from work in Glendale. She had driven past the Alex Theater marquis and seen John Cleese's name perched on it. "Why don't you look that up and see what's going on?" Abby knows how obedient I can be when she asks me to do something I want to do. It turned out that not only Cleese, but Eric Idle was on the bill for Tuesday, Nov. 18th. Unfortunately (for me, not for Cleese and Idle), the L.A. Live Talks show was sold out. Exhausting all possibilities (how do you think she wound up with me?) Abby asked a kind co-worker with connections to the Alex Theater and the Glendale arts community, who scored us a couple of general admission seats. My sincere gratitude to the co-worker, the wife, and whoever the hell his contact was.

Our evening began with a pork sandwich and tremendous anxiety. After dinner at Porto's across the street (my sincere gratitude to the owners of Porto's, the counter server, and whoever the hell the pig was,) we walked over to the theater an hour early to find it mobbed, with two lines snaking out from the theater in opposite directions. Once we got our tickets, we realized the seats were not assigned. We were going to have to race and fight for our seats. Lucky for me, Abby was wearing gorgeous but uncomfortable boots, which means I'd be doing the racing. We stood in line, eyes sharp for any advantage, listening to the conversations around us. It was a genteel crowd of older wanna-be hipster intellectuals, trying to out-conversate each other, with an occasional whack job wearing a Holy Grail shirt shambling by. "I hope Eric sings," one man pined. (Spoiler alert; His dream would be crushed!)

But the crew at the Alex had their act together, and Abby and I found two very nice seats off right in the balcony, with a nice if slightly distant view of two red thick plush velvet chairs, with a small coffee table between them, water bottles at the ready. Is it unjust that their seats were so much nicer than ours? We watched other people play games on their phones-- there was solitaire to the left of us, and some ball sorting game down and to t right. After a decent interval plus an indecent delay, the Live Talks representative announced other upcoming shows. One of them, Anne Rice, the writer of Gothic horror and erotica, being interviewed by her son, seemed promising. ("Mom, can we discuss "Sleeping Beauty?" "No!") He then said that it was pointless to introduce tonight's guest, and instead, he had asked them to introduce each other. (Spoiler alert; This never happened! Gyp! I want my money back!) Then out they came-- Eric Idle and John Cleese, big as life, entering from stage left.

Then, off they went, cheerfully sauntering off stage, no doubt congratulating themselves on a job well done. We clapped, called for an encore, and kept our eyes affixed on stage right, where they had exited-- Only to be surprised by another stage left entrance. These guys are good!

Okay, house cleaning time-- I didn't record the show (wasn't sure it was ethical, let alone legal) and my shorthand gets confused with my backhand, which kept poor Abby on her gorgeously booted toes, so my recollection of everything they said is incomplete. My general impressions follow.

They began by getting comfortable, each stretching out in his chair and sighing contentedly. There was some confusion over who was interviewing who. Cleese had a cold, which he apologized for, and he complimented Idle's youth and health-- 71 years of age, versus Cleese's 75. After a bit, it was decided that, since Cleese had the new book out, Idle would ask the questions. "I've written a book," Cleese brags. "Have you ever written a book?" Whereupon Idle embarrasses Cleese with the vast number of books he's written, none of them particularly successful, but all of them numerous.

Idle complimented the book, ("well written") but criticized it for stopping at the Monty Python years, or presumably, just when it got to Idle. But as it turns out, Idle was at Cambridge while Cleese was there (though they only overlapped a year,) so they had worked together before, including Idle playing some thankless roles in "At Last The 1948 Show", such as a hand or a dead body.

The book, I hear, is primarily about Cleese's childhood and college years, and Idle brought up some anecdotes, such as Cleese waking up to find his controlling mother cutting his hair. I had thought Cleese had a hostile antipathy towards his CPA Dad, but apparently, he was very fond of his Dad, and this comes out in the book. Cleese, having failed to get into college at first due to the influx of returning WW2 soldiers, taught at his prep school for a year or so, and referred to that time as the happiest of his life. This stunned me! Life as a writer and star of stage and screen was less happy than teaching kids? But, Cleese insists, "There was no pressure."

There was some mention of the other Pythons, including an anecdote about Terry Jones ("Jonesy") cutting his face in the middle of the recent O2 show, and performing the Four Yorkshiremen sketch with blood running down his cheek. So alarmed was Cleese that he completely went up on his lines (that he wrote) and the sketch was totally messed up. Backstage, Eddie Izzard consoled him. "They all know the sketch," Izzard counseled. "They've seen you do it right. This time, they got to see something new." Cleese did a hilarious impersonation of Terry Gilliam and his incomprehensible midwestern accent, and there was some discussion of Graham Chapman ("Dear Graham", Cleese called him,) who was much beloved and very aggravating. Cleese recounted a Monty Python sketch about a sculptor that had to be abandoned because Chapman was too drunk to remember the lines. And there were some digs thrown at Palin's Diaries, which I found unconscionable. As readers of this blog know, I am aghast that anyone would have anything negative to say about Palin's Diaries... his maddeningly incomplete diaries. (Cleese and Idle apparently find them a bit dull.)

At the evening's mid-point, questions were presented, and Idle dutifully asked some of them. One of them, "What five people, alive or dead, would you want to have dinner with?" created a sweet, if slightly unctious moment. Cleese's dinner-mates were mostly dead-- W.C. Fields, Cary Grant, Plato, ("Don't go to Socrates'," Idle warned, "The drinks are shit.") Christ-- at this point, Cleese racks his brain to think of a fifth, until he lays eyes on Idle. "Oh, and you!"  Awwwww!

One of the questions asked about influences, and all of the influences both Cleese and Idle named were unknown here in the states, except for "The Goon Show." Radio comedians and personalities were what influenced these comic giants, because, they reminded us, they didn't grow up with television, but with radio. Idle even opined that radio fostered a more intellectual form of humor. I can see that (or hear it) as the medium forces your brain to make connections that television won't ask of you.

Of the entire evening, there were two sections that really stood out for me. One was the sketch of London in the early 60s, just before things started to "swing." Cleese and Idle recalled where the good shows were, which dorms had a "smoker", and the first time they saw "Beyond the Fringe", which was the funniest thing either of them had seen to date. Up until that point, you never made fun of the PMs, the royalty or the cabinet-- it just wasn't seen as polite. Idle talked about the deference shown to authority, how all the talk show guests were senior politicians and captains of industry, until the Beatles swung through and everything changed. Things changed at Cambridge, as well. Cambridgean David Frost ("Sewwwww-PAH!") had hit it big with "This Was The Week That Was" and suddenly comedians fresh out of college were being hired to write for BBC Light Entertainment and ITV. Their recollections of the era brought it to life for me, and made me wish I'd been there.

All of the Pythonians were part of this lucky surge from college straight to television writing, and it didn't end with television. Cleese's Cambridge show "A Clump of Plinths" was a huge hit at the Edinburgh Festival, and a theater impresario decided to take it on tour-- to New Zealand. "We left London in 1964--" Cleese began, and Idle continues "And arrived in New Zealand in 1864." One of Cleese's bits in this show was the Biblical Weather Report, which Idle briefly ran through. "We have frogs coming in from the north, and tomorrow's forecast, the death of every first born." Cleese recounted doing that bit for a group of ladies during a matinee. Cleese allows that if you're doing comedy and you get pallid laughs, you get anxious and try hard to be funnier. But on this particular show, they were getting no laughs whatsoever. On top of that, before the show they heard a lot of clinking, and when they peeked out from the wings to see what the deal was, they saw that all the ladies in the audience had tea cups and spoons. The entire show played to their bemused silence. Bets started flying around backstage, and Cleese bet a lot of money that he would get a laugh out of these women. He went out to do the Biblical Weather Report, and there was not a titter. He decided to ad lib. "And coming in from the South Southwest? Boils!" Nothing-- except for boisterous laughter coming from his fellow comedians in the wings. Cleese lost it and started laughing hysterically, unable to stop for some time. "The ladies weren't much bothered by it," Cleese tearfully finishes.

The other nice thing was the sketches. Having written for, among other things, "At Last, the 1948 Show", Cleese expressed regret that the BBC had opted to wipe the videotapes that had the old shows on them. The result was lots of television material lost forever. Some of it was being recovered, discovered in a BBC vault or whatever, but all that remains of much of it is in the memories and old scripts of those involved in making the show. Cleese had a few of those scripts, and he's reprinted them in his book. Bragging that they were "as funny as anything Monty Python ever did", he cajoled Idle into reading them with him, and so we got to see two members of Python perform lost material.

Both sketches were typically Cleese, with a man walking into a shop, engaging the steward, and one driving the other crazy. Of the two sketches that were read, only one of them was truly "lost". The other had been performed by Idle and Cleese (in a rewritten form) on the Contractual Obligation album. It was the book shop sketch with a customer asking for strangely named books by Dikkens (not Dickens), the well-known Dutch author. Written originally for Marty Feldman, (who was a mere writer before Cleese kicked him out in front of the footlights, according to Cleese-- imagine, no "Young Frankenstein" if not for Monty Python!) this sketch takes the side of the company in the whole customer service debate that Cleese had going on in his early years. (As opposed to the Parrot Sketch, which takes the side of the customer.) It shows, once again, Cleese's proclivity for recycling his material. Although not asked the hard question of why he doesn't write more, Cleese was asked about psychotherapy and what effect it had on his writing. "Therapy makes you more creative, but less productive," he replied. A-ha!

The second sketch was new to me, though, and quintessentially 60s. It was a man walking into a shop (of course) trying to improve his memory. Cleese read the part of the memory expert, who had created a byzantine technique for memorization involving association. The associations were random, long trains, often involving a "nude lady" (I love how polite the Brits are, to refer to naked women as nude ladies. Much more amenable than the current euphemisms used on the porn sites. "Big dick totally destroys a... nude lady.") and a hole through which to spy on her. Although I would disagree that it was as funny as anything Python had done, it was pretty funny. "The Battle of Trafalgar, Trafalgar Square, a square hole, you look through the hole and you see a nude lady. The nude lady has boots so you can't see her toes. Subtract ten..."

But the real joy for me, beyond the material, was seeing Cleese and Idle read it together, and enjoy reading it together. There was an effortless grace to their reads, indifferent to timing, supremely confident in the audience's reaction. Idle was all crisp precision, while Cleese read with a rumbling pride and delight in his old sketches, sharing them with all the affection of a grandfather showing off his grandchild's pictures or finger paintings.

Idle was quick and brilliant, posting bon mots throughout the night, every one of them hitting the mark. He threw in the quick jokes, while Cleese offered the anecdotes. He pulled out his Anne Elk impersonation, trying at one point to crack Idle up, and failing. The two of them shared a comfort and warmth for each other that resonated throughout the theater. They had been through the years together, had accomplished much, and were now at the other end of it all, looking back fondly and funnily at what the hell had just happened to them. At evening's end, they embraced, bidding each other goodbye, and I wondered fleetingly-- was that it? Was that the last time the two of them will share the stage before one of them kicks it? Tim Curry was apparently in the audience, in a wheelchair due to a stroke. Tim Curry! How much longer could either of them have, before infirmity sets in? Ten years?

But these thoughts were fleeting, as I said. What stayed with me were the quality of the reminiscences. Few of the stories were about their fame and success. (Although Idle floated the idea of having another Monty Python reunion, with no show-- just the five of them eating dinner on stage. They wouldn't even be mic-ed. Hell, I'd go!) They were all about the struggles, the failures, the debacles.

Well, hell, guys-- I've had those. I remember doing a sketch show, stepping off the stage during a blackout, and landing, on my feet, about two yards down. I remember a goatee falling off during a live show, and the jokes we had to instantly make up so that the sketch would still work. I remember cracking up cast members and enduring humiliations and performing for old ladies who had no friggin' idea what or who we were. Cleese and Idle were no longer alien beings a million miles away, but we were fellow troubadours with similar anecdotes. As long as we avoided topics like "accomplishment" or "success", I'd get along just fine.

Thank you, John Cleese and Eric Idle,for a wonderful evening, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. You looked as though you did. And next time you're in Glendale, swing by Porto's. They make a great pork sandwich!

Next week; Episode 30 - "Blood, Devastation, Death, War and Horror"