It's been well over a year since Monty Python hosted the second in their series of deaths.
Graham Chapman left us in 1989, lured away by cancer. His demise was seen as tragic, as he was still very young and vital-- he'd only done "Life of Brian" ten years before.
Terry Jones' passing, on the other hand, was accepted more casually. He had been enduring dementia, declining mentally as well as physically. Unlike many Monty Python jokes, we totally saw this coming.
There is a cruelty to age, beyond the affronts to health and dignity. People are less appalled by your death. It reminds me of a Louis C.K. bit-- he talks about hearing that someone's grandmother had passed away. "Awww, I'm so sorry. How old was she?"
"Ninety-eight."
"Oh... why'd you even bother telling me?"
While his death might seem an organic, inevitable, part of the whole "circle of life" thing, I'm guessing that it was a big deal to Terry Jones, had he the wherewithal to notice it. Google says he died of complications due to dementia. I don't know what this means. It's one thing to forget your own identity, but apparently you can forget to be alive.
At any rate, he has kicked the bucket, and it is only right that we take a moment to assess his gifts to us. For they were substantial.
Monty Python was conceived as a sketch comedy television show. Of all of the performers and writers in the group, Terry Jones was the least dynamic. He lacked the depth of Palin or the sheer talent of Cleese. He wasn't as silly as Chapman, nor as quick as Idle. Even Gilliam blew him away. Jones was frequently cast as the straight man, the anonymous doctor, the housewife. Though he occasionally was given a broader role, such as the Bishop, ("It's the Bishop!"), his portrayals seemed to sag somehow. Two exceptions; his turn as Trotsky in the Cycling Tour, and his frequent "Mrs. Ratbag" portrayals. But for the most part, he underwhelmed as a performer.
As for his sketch contributions, less is known about that. But usually, if there is a classic sketch, there is an anecdote behind it. Nudge, Nudge was written by Idle, Palin wrote The Spanish Inquisition, Cleese and Chapman wrote the Parrot Sketch. We don't have any Jones anecdotes that I know of. His contributions were usually more along the conceptual line.
This opinion isn't just mine. It was also shared by Jones, He was insecure, both as a writer and performer, and frequently teamed up with Palin to help sell his work to the group. In this heady realm of comic gods, Jones was a demi-god at best.
But if Monty Python had ended as it had been conceived-- a sketch comedy show-- we would not be discussing it today. In fact, for a sample of what Monty Python might have looked like without Terry Jones, check out John Cleese's "How to Irritate People". It is a straightforward sketch comedy collection, and it is dreary and dull. Monty Python went further, did much more than their contemporaries. In fact, Monty Python still does more, 50 years later, than most sketch comedy shows. This is almost entirely due to Terry Jones.
Jones, invited on board by Palin, planted his flag early. He saw that the BBC had given them unprecedented freedom, and he saw that potential more clearly than anyone else. In fact, it might have been dissatisfaction with his own work as a sketch comedian that urged him to go beyond sketch comedy, into avante-garde television and film. He created a niche for himself in the group, and in doing so, defined Monty Python as "something completely different" for all time.
This led to many fights over the years. Jones would often solicit opinions, but would rarely listen to them, so fervent was his belief that he knew the correct way to proceed. "I really feel..." he would say, as if his feelings were God's truth. It made for testy collaborations. If, for instance, there was a scarcely noticed prop in a sketch that depicted a lamb turned into a chandelier, Terry might "feel" that it should be a bobcat instead of a lamb. Cleese might disagree, saying the lamb was funnier, whereupon they would argue for days about a prop most people would never notice. Terry once admitted that he may have thrown a chair on one such occasion, probably at poor Cleese. But Jones "felt", without any doubt, things had to be a certain way. His stubborn, Welsh way.
While working with Palin and Idle on "Do Not Adjust Your Set", he found himself inspired by the stream-of-consciousness animations of Terry Gilliam and wanted to mirror that dynamic with the sketches and the shape of the show itself. He wanted to do away with format and typical sketch structure. Given how frustrated the others were by the relatively stilted sketch comedy tradition in Great Britain at the time, Jones' ambition folded in nicely with their own wishes.
This led to some unsettling, almost dangerous shows, especially in the third season. The episodes seemed ready to spin right off the reel as order and form dissolved under Jones' anarchic tendencies. Remember "Spam", where the sketch seems to end, only to invade Palin's Historian's presentation. The sketch returns, like a relapse of herpes, with floating characters, Vikings, and confused Hungarians wandering around, the audience kind of laughing, and a caption reads "In 1970, Monty Python lay in ruins..."
It's not funny. It's odd and strange. We get none of the resolution dopamine that the more structured episodes give us. But it stays with you-- for decades. It's memorable in a way that most shows are not. I wasn't there during the assembly of this show, but I gotta say, this feels like Jones.
It was Jones who pushed the group out of the TV studio and out on film locations. It was Jones who hectored the show's director, telling him where the camera should be. It was Jones in the editing room, putting the episodes together. While the other writers were scribbling away, scratching for content, Jones was forging their material into a dynamic, format-less presentation, creating new possibilities for connections, jokes, bits. Jones shaped the show, and as it turned out, the shape became an important part of its enduring success.
Beyond the TV show, it was Jones who pushed the look of their movies to convincingly reflect the setting. In "Life of Brian", you could practically taste the dust, while "The Holy Grail" is still regarded as one of the best and most truthfully depicted medieval films ever made, decades before CGI made a film's look much easier to accomplish. Of course, Gilliam had a lot to do with all of that, as well, but Jones' ambition pushed that envelope to the very limits. To this day, the other Pythons look back in wonder at the "Every Sperm is Sacred" number from "Meaning of Life". It's a not so subtle send-up of "Oliver", but Jones, the director, took it far beyond homage, leaving spoof and satire in the dust, and gave us an old-school, opulent, overblown musical number that could stand up to the best of Hollywood's golden era.
It was also Jones who, with Palin, created the Monty Python discography, which added a few dozen classics to the Python oeuvre. Because of the reluctance of some of the others to bother with the records, Jones had more of an opportunity to fine-tune his audio game. While the "Worry Song" was a bit forced, Jones' "I Like Traffic Lights" from the Contractual Obligation Album was a pitch-perfect demonstration of creative despair, and the Aggressive Church sketch he performed with Chapman was sublime. "Did I hit it?" "Yeah, right up the aisle."
I'm a sketch writer/performer (accent on the "former",) so I've always had more affinity for the sketch work Python produced. My Python heroes were Cleese, Gilliam, Palin, and Idle. But it must be said that without Jones' gravity working its will on the sketches, Monty Python might never have broken through the noise generated by all the other sketch shows in late 60's Great Britain. I will be grateful for his opinionated, stubborn Welsh ass until I join him in the Choir Invisible-- and he tells me he really feels I'm singing the song wrong and throws his halo at me. Thank you, Terry Jones!
No comments:
Post a Comment