And now for something completely familiar

"Monty Python's Flying Circus": Still the best TV sketch show there's ever been.

By George Rafael

Oct 5, 1999 | Study hall, a ghastly prep school down South, 1974. The monitor, a hirsute creep who teaches math, leaves us unattended for a few minutes to cop a feel from the history teacher, a Phyllis George lookalike we all fantasize about. Chip (there's always somebody named Chip in prep school) turns to Craig and asks if he caught Python on Sunday. "Say no more! A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat!" Someone in the back row starts squawking. Not being in on the joke, I tug my forelock and humbly beseech Craig, mighty, pint-sized Craig, forecloser of widows and orphans, "What's Monty Python?" As if I had to ask. "It's crazy man, crazy. You'll never get it." Uh huh. The math geek returns suddenly, catching us in midair -- 100 lines of "I will not talk in study hall."

I tune in Sunday and see a homicidal barber become transformed into a lumber-jill: "I wish I'd been a girlie/Just like my dear papa!" Verrry interesting. I tune in next Sunday, and the next, and witness, in bizarre succession, a movie concessionaire hawking his one ware, a dead albatross; a restaurant sketch where a minor complaint about a dirty fork ends in a scene worthy of Greek tragedy via French farce; the great Scottish poet Ewan McTeagle, whose subject is money ("Can I have 50 pounds to mend the shed?"). A Godsend. Unlike anything else I've ever seen, with every stupid clichi and solemnity punctured. A breath of fresh air in suffocating Texas. Who says there isn't intelligent life on the boob tube? To paraphrase the Algonquin wit and playwright George S. Kaufman, satire is what closes Sunday night.

Word spreads and presently scores of maladjusted, smartass adolescents across the Dallas-Fort Worth area are in on our open secret. At my next, even ghastlier school, a miserable Catholic compound, lines and catch phrases from Python are like Masonic handshakes. ("It opens doors. I'm telling you.") My best friend and I crack up in soccer practice with impromptu Dirty Vicar gropings (he the Dirty Vicar, I the violated Carol Cleveland) or definitions from the Hungarian phrase book ("My nipples explode with delight!"). A clever boots in the lower grades is given to breaking into the Spam song at lunch, a musical interlude that uplifts our spirits and ever so briefly takes our minds off the soylent green plopped on our trays. Senior year, "Life of Brian" is the hot topic. It is made clear that those of us who -- heaven forfend! -- watch the damned thing are doomed to go to hell; I go to New York instead.

At art school and college I am finally comfortable enough with my social handicap to come out as a Python bore. And why not? They're everywhere. The Masonic handshake becomes a bone-crunching grip, lame silly walks are trotted out at the slightest hint, dead parrots are flogged unto oblivion. The Python litmus test no longer applies; you can hardly distinguish connoisseurs from maniacs, hepcats from squares, kosher from trafe.

By the early 1980s, Python is mainstream, even middlebrow. The savvy six who launched their U.S. invasion from the Sonys of north Texas -- Southern Anglophilia played its part ("I just luuuv their accents!") -- sweep the nation. The mendicants at PBS have a hit on their hands with a show that by the time it ended in 1974 was supposedly two or three years past its peak. Oh. Well. Never mind, as Gilda Radner's Emily Latella used to say.

Which brings up another pointed stick. The rise in surly, satirical North American comedy in the '70s is said by some to have been inspired by Python. And so it was -- and wasn't. On the face of it, Python's influence was purely formal, sanctioning silliness and organized disorder; anarchy in the USA, for the first time since Sid Caesar and "Your Show of Shows."

It was all right again for a skit not to have a beginning, a middle or an end -- or to have all three but not necessarily in that order. Yet unlike previous British invasions, theirs wasn't so much an invasion as it was a visitation from a tea-smoking transatlantic aunty, British cool as opposed to Yank and Skeetch edge. "SCTV" and "Saturday Night Live" owed considerably more to Mad and the National Lampoon (and to Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor) than to the fag end of 1960s British satire. (Ernie Kovacs is another key, particularly for the Americans.) For despite Python's universal appeal -- the show even took off in that happy Heimat of thigh-slapping merry pranksters, the old West Germany (Bavarian TV commissioned three episodes of "Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus" in the mid-1970s) -- their humor is uniquely British or, in that trite Little England phrase, quintessentially English.

Next Page: Tom Stoppard wishes he were half as good as Monty Python

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