Michael Palin - "What a Stroke of Luck!"

"I always wanted to be an explorer, but-- it seemed that I was doomed to be nothing more than a very silly person." - Michael Palin

Everyone loves Michael. Don't believe me? Source it. Terry Gilliam says "Mike was the one that everyone liked..." in David Morgan's Monty Python Speaks. John Cleese adds that he's"immensely likeable." Only Graham Chapman is silent on the subject. (What's that about?) Terry Jones wouldn't write with anyone else, and Cleese preferred performing with him over everyone else. Michael is Python's favorite son, a veritable Joseph in a coat of many colors, only without the jealous brothers. He's been married with children since before the Python days, which would indicate that even his wife likes him and prefers performing with him over everyone else.

Palin's fabled affability is an extraordinary stroke of luck for all concerned. Without him, there wouldn't have been a Monty Python, and if there were, it wouldn't have lasted a season. There was ample talent in the group, and with it came ample ego. Cleese and Jones, locked in a life or death struggle for the direction of the group, needed Palin to smooth the waters and keep both hooks baited. As the story goes, Cleese was offered a show. Chapman was his writing partner, but Chapman was notoriously unreliable. (Or as Palin said at Chapman's funeral, "I'm sure that Graham is with us now... or he will be in twenty minutes.") Cleese didn't want a one or two man show. He also wanted to work with Palin, having seen him throughout the years in their university revue days, and most recently in "The Complete and Utter History of Britain." "Well, you won't be doing any more of those," Cleese remarked. Kind of like walking up to the girl of your dreams and saying "Let me know when you're tired of dating sociopaths." Palin brought writing partner Jones, as well as Eric Idle and Gilliam, whom he had worked with on "Do Not Adjust Your Set". For the mathematically inclined, Palin's posse was 2/3s of the group.

In terms of performance, Cleese was in hog heaven. All of the major Cleese sketches, including Dead

Parrot, Argument Clinic and Cheese Shop, are performed almost solely by Cleese and Palin. What's more, writing for Palin seems to have brought out the best in Cleese, adding a soft silliness that had eluded him in the past. Palin's shopkeepers, affable yet extraordinarily resistant to the concept of customer service, found new depths of excuses, rationalizations and outright British bullshit, all expressed through Palin's implacable good nature. "He's probably pining for the Fjords," Palin says of the dead Norwegian Blue Parrot. Palin brought a kindness to Cleese's work that only made the frustration sharper, more cruel. It was a  match made for the ages.

Jones would claim the same for his collaboration with Palin, but there are few memorable Palin/Jones sketches. This is because Jones had his sights set on film, not comedy, and the compression of their teamwork was rarely evident. We come close with "Cycling Tour", a half-hour sketch/episode that followed Jones and Palin on a tour of Cold War Europe, but Jones spends most of the bit under one identity delusion or another, and is rarely able to interact with Palin's character. Still, Jones would usually (and wisely) cast Palin in his work, and never let anyone else see it until Palin signed off.

Forget about the collaborations for a moment, and consider the sheer volume of Palin's writing output. I was stunned, as I began this blog, to discover just how many of the quintessentially Python sketches were written by Palin/Jones. Spanish Inquisition, Lumberjack, Spam, yes, but also Johann Gambolputty and Ministry of Silly Walks! Cleese, who was forced to do it for the rest of his life, hated that sketch, and yet it always felt like a Cleese sketch to me. There are stories of the series winding down for the year, and the rest of the crew would be off on whatever Mediterranean tour, while Jones and Palin stuck around to finish things up. I would imagine this gave them vast opportunities for quickie material thrust in here and there.  But even without that, Palin had a work ethic that created mountains of material that dwarfed the output of others.

But... and I want to be very careful here... it was also a lucky thing for Michael Palin that Monty Python happened. It gave him a context, without which, he would have been little more than a middling writer and performer. And the reason I claim this is simple-- At the start, Palin had little to say. His sketches play like revue spoofs, brilliant yet somehow empty. Is he doing a sketch about a transvestite lumberjack, or a psychotic barber? Both, and consequently, neither. It's just a sketch. While we celebrate the hard right turn, we also have to jettison the prior material as meaningless. In fact, the meaning behind many of Palin's sketches is that there is no meaning. Reality is up for grabs, and with reality, character and motivation. Nothing is organic, it's all written, and we're all actors performing unprepared for an anonymous audience. But even that's not really true.

Palin grew as a writer after the series ended, and much of his material for the movies is clever and insightful, as well as hysterically funny. But imagine, during Palin's rebuke of King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail ("Listen, strange women lying in ponds..."), imagine that Palin stops in the middle, addresses the camera and does a royal weather report. Random? Yes. Satisfying? Hell no. We need to see the violence inherent in the system! We need to believe that this King is being brought up short by the smart peasant Dennis, and at the same time, that Dennis is an asshole that creates his own oppression. A goofy song in the middle would have torn the illusion to shreds. Fortunately, by then, Palin was too good a writer to let that happen.

Palin and Cleese, in later years.

It may be that his experience with Python deepened him as a writer and person. Once the show became the pop cultural touchstone we know and love, Palin had something to protect. He and Jones fought against distributors bringing Flying Circus to the States if it meant they could re-edit the programs. And if you haven't seen Palin lose his famous affability in the defense of "The Life of Brian", check it out here. I would argue that the experience of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and the fame that accrued from it, gave him a sense of himself as a person with something to say-- something that needed to be understood, if heard.

Finally, it was from the platform of Monty Python that Palin got his dream gig-- being paid to travel! Taking the job refused by Alan Whicker (oh, sweet irony of life!), Palin has had a hugely successful second career as a world traveler and professional experience junkie, spinning his exploits into numerous BBC television series and books and cashing in on the reality TV craze. Talk about luck!

It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, apparently.

 Next week; Episode 35 - The Nude Man".