The Life of Python : It’s been 25 years since the six men of Monty Python banded together to skewer authority, celebrate silliness and always look on the bright side of death. The Beatles of comedy? Well, don’t expect a reunion from these guys either.

D eath be not proud seems to be one of the chief themes of the collective canon of Monty Python, the six-man British comedy troupe whose work first began airing on the BBC a quarter-century ago this month. Their TV show was infamous for its litany of dead parrots, sick undertakers and quasi-cannibals; their movies signified by medieval torture and disease, heroes dying on crosses and grim reapers. In Monty Python’s world, there are 8 million ways to die--all of them silly.

“I think all of us have always been intrigued about how far you can go, to explore the areas that are supposed to be banned to comedy, that they’re either in bad taste or they’re too painful for people to deal with,” says ex-Python animator Terry Gilliam, now a successful film director. “And I think that’s what one should be dealing with.

“Comedy is to keep the angel of death away. I always think, if you can laugh at it, it somehow diffuses the potency of things, whether they be diseases, death, whatever.

“I’ve been getting away from comedy toward more serious things in my own films. But I do know that if I ever get to the point where I can’t make a joke about anything , it’s time to pack it in and get out. I love bad taste jokes. I don’t know if you were at the event the other night when David Sherlock, Graham’s longtime companion, brought Graham (Chapman) to the party?”

Gilliam is referring to the opening night of the 25th-anniversary salute to Monty Python held last month at the Directors Guild. This film festival (co-sponsored by the American Cinematheque and the British Assn. of Film and Television) featured the most comprehensive roundup of Python group and solo work ever assembled. And, as the only official MP commemoration on either side of the Atlantic this year, the five-day confab was able to claim four of six Python members on the premises--Gilliam, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Graham Chapman--with only John Cleese and Michael Palin not making the fest.

Of course, it’s been a little more than five years since Chapman--to quote the dead parrot sketch--”rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.” Which would seem to have precluded any further personal appearances.

And yet, announced Sherlock, as the assembled gathered to pay tribute to the legendarily wild Chapman on the opening night, “I think Graham would’ve absolutely loved to have been here tonight, and I’ve done my very best to bring Graham with me. And here he is.” Whereupon Chapman’s ex reached into a packet, pulled out some ashes and proceeded to gently sprinkle several smatterings of his late, longtime companion’s remains onto unsuspecting patrons in the front rows.

“Now how many people would do that?” asks Gilliam, still giggling in his inimically maniacal fashion days later, appreciating that Sherlock’s unexpected gesture managed to incorporate shock value and sentiment. “And I think it’s wonderful. I’m sure most of the people there thought it was a joke, but it really was Graham. A bit of him.”

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Just as there’s literally a trace of Python now, presumably, in the Directors Guild’s vacuums and a few dozen shower drains around the city, there’s much more than a bit of Python in the state of contemporary comedy, as the troupe’s sweeping influence continues to be deeply felt.

Would the world have been ready--one can only wonder--for “Mrs. Doubtfire,” the Kids in the Hall, RuPaul or “Ed Wood” without Python’s pioneering transvestism, on a scale not seen since the days of Shakespeare?

More seriously, would there have been a “Saturday Night Live” as we know it without the debt that transformingly irreverent series’ creator and original cast acknowledged they owed to their British forebears?

It’s cliche by now to refer to Monty Python as “the Beatles of comedy.” But the analogy holds up, inasmuch as the group’s whole was even stronger than the sum of its highly individualistic solo parts, and inasmuch as their psychic effect on society at a turning point in history for youth culture was incalculable.

Python itself borrowed heavily from literary and pop media antecedents but, caught up in the anarchic spirit of the late ‘60s, the group synthesized these elements like no one before (or, really, since)--mixing the arcane with the juvenile, sight gags with slippery linguistics, biting anti-authoritarian satire with unrepentant silliness, pointed social parody with non sequiturs.

And, to wax post-modern for a moment, here was deconstructionism--a self-reflexive playing with the very form itself--on a level not heretofore witnessed in the mass media, later to be echoed a bit more linearaly by descendants from Steve Martin to David Letterman.

A few dictionaries now even include a definition for the critically oft-used word Pythonesque . England’s Chambers Dictionary defines the word as meaning “bizarre and surreal,” while the Dictionary of Slang qualifies this to specifically define the adjective as suggesting “a set of events that are more than bizarre, but less than surreal” (emphasis ours).

But “the great thing about Python was that it was very, very hard to define exactly what the humor was,” says Michael Palin, reached at his home in London, where he’s at work on a novel. “We had Terry Gilliam’s animation, which was an enormous advantage; we had bits on film; we had a real rag-bag of ideas that never went anywhere, as well as conventional sketches; and the sort of, if you like, destruction of a conventional television format.

“I don’t think we can talk about evolutionary scales (just) 25 years down the road. But the fact that it’s still being shown in countries as diverse as Turkey, New Zealand and Czechoslovakia--and Latvia’s just bought the shows--must mean we did something right. . . . I think anybody who thinks the world is a bit dull tends to like Python, because they see Python as still shaking up something, as still doing something that was a bit irresponsible. And I suppose that is what endures.”

Monty Python as a working unit, of course, has not endured, the apparent swan song having been the 1983 movie “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.”

And when a brave soul in the audience at the Directors Guild last month proffered the hope of a possible Python reunion during a post-screening Q&A;, Idle--perhaps the least nostalgic of all ex-Pythons, rivaled only by Cleese--quickly pooh-poohed any such hope.

“Very, very no chance at all,” Idle told the disappointed fan. “No, it’s very hard to do when Graham persists in remaining dead. I think he’s gone on too long now.”

Gilliam, for his part, is a bit more elaborative about why a Chapman-less Python wouldn’t slither.

“I think we ought to have a Python reunion with Julian Lennon playing Graham’s part,” he quips. “That would do it.

“Really, what was really important was the six of us. And I think what intrigued me--probably this is like any of the rock groups--is the particular chemistry created by the six people together, and it wasn’t the same in the shows we did when one was out of it. The dynamic had shifted, it wasn’t quite right, it didn’t have that quantum leap.” (One test of this was the TV series’ fourth and final season in 1974, after Cleese had quit the show, though he later rejoined for all the subsequent albums, concert tours and movies.)

“I’m always amazed by the serendipitous nature of things, how we all just happened to get together at the right time, and intrigued by when you put two things together and out of it comes something greater, that in people’s minds becomes more indelible,” Gilliam says. “I think that was the case with Python--because if people didn’t get the jokes about logical positivism and the German philosophers, they’d get the joke of a foot coming down and squashing something with a fart noise.”

N o reunion? No matter. The popularity hasn’t waned to speak of, not after uninterrupted years of American reruns of the TV series (currently on Comedy Central) and frequent revivals of the films have captured several successive generations. This fall is actually seeing an unprecedented number of new Python products released--among them, a boxed set compressing all the group’s albums onto five CDs and, most excitingly, a brave new CD-ROM that actually does the lunatic Python spirit justice. (See story below.)

It’s suggested that Monty Python may be bigger--and more profitable, certainly--in death than in life.

“We’re the Marilyn Monroe of comedy, are we?” giggles Gilliam. “You’re probably right. If we were still doing the shows, we’d just be these old farts, hanging on. By being exotic, distant, we don’t have to do the work anymore; in death you become emblematic or symbolic of a golden age. You can’t do it if somebody’s alive and hanging around your doorstep and continuing to embarrass you in public.”

The 25th anniversary brings forth reactions from the group members as divergent as their legendary personality quirks. The extroverts of the group were Chapman, Palin, Jones and Gilliam, while Cleese and Idle were the “difficult,” pensive introverts; their feelings about recalling Python’s salad days pretty much fall along party lines.

“It feels rather jolly, really. It’s a momentous moment here!” says Terry Jones, the most effusive and (yes) jolly of the Pythons, reached at his London home on Oct. 5, the actual anniversary of the first TV episode’s airing. “But I’m glad it only happens every 25 years.”

Reached that same day, Palin is slightly more reserved, but characteristically upbeat--he being the one everyone to a man calls “the nice Python.”

“If Python was anything, it wasn’t sentimental; it sort of lived for the moment,” Palin says. “I’m extremely grateful that anyone in the world wants to keep watching Python material, and it’s fascinating to know that it’s jumped a generation and there are now teen-agers who are as enthusiastic as they were 25 years ago . . . but it’s not like the end of World War II or something.”

Cleese and Idle declined to be interviewed for this story, but have made public statements reflecting their lack of interest in discussing Python-mania.

Asked his feelings at a Q&A; he took part in as part of the festival, Idle allowed, “It’s nice, and we like the checks. It is very flattering, but it’s strange as well. It’s a bit like somebody throwing you a wedding anniversary for a wife you left 12 years ago. But thanks anyway.”

From his home in England, Cleese sent a welcoming statement to be read at a Python anniversary party at the British consul general’s home in Los Angeles, a non-greeting that those who know his temperament would say is probably only half-facetious:

“I am extremely disappointed that the Monty Python 25th anniversary celebration is taking place. It would be more truly Pythonic to celebrate Monty Python’s 27th anniversary. Therefore,” Cleese wrote--reviving abuse once shouted from a castle turret in a bad French accent--”a plague on you all, and, I quote, ‘I wave my private parts in your general direction’.”

N o one--least of all the BBC-- soothsaw Monty Python as bound for glory when the show inauspiciously began in a late-night slot on Oct. 5, 1969.

All six had extensive TV comedy experience but were far from stars. Cleese--then as now probably the most recognizable of the bunch, known to Brits in the late ‘60s for his sketch work on David Frost’s humor shows--was asked by the BBC to put together a new comedy team for a late Saturday night slot. The obvious first choice was Chapman, his writing partner since their Cambridge days.

The remaining four acquaintances Cleese recruited were, at the time, all working on a children’s series (as was Python musical collaborator Neil Innes, then a member of the Bonzo Dog Band). Idle was another Cambridge alumnus who tended to work on his own; Jones and Palin were a writing team who’d met up at Oxford; and “token American” Gilliam was an ex-Angeleno who’d gone to Occidental College and migrated to England in ’67.

“I think the main thing is that it was a group of people who knew exactly what they were looking for,” Gilliam says. “At that particular time, the BBC were very laissez faire about their shows, and if you got the go-ahead, they didn’t pay any attention to you. It wasn’t watered down by committees and executives getting together and deciding what the public wanted. It was six people saying, ‘If it makes us laugh, in it goes.’ It’s uneven, but there’s a voice there you can actually hear.”

However startlingly original, that new voice was not immaculately conceived.

“I think Python is just in a tradition of absurdist, anarchic humor that you could trace back to Rabelais and Lord Sterne,” says Jones, who wrote a book on Chaucer and is probably the most literarily oriented of the group. “If you read ‘Tristram Shandy’ (Sterne’s 18th-Century stream-of-consciousness novel), it’s the same sort of absurdity we were doing. He has a few pages blank in the middle of the novel, with a chapter heading saying ‘A Chapter in Which Very Little Happens’.”

Two more contemporary antecedents also bear noting: Spike Milligan’s “Q5” TV series, which pre-dated Python in often substituting transitions for punchlines; and the 1950s radio series “The Goon Show,” which featured Milligan and Peter Sellers.

A merican audiences may see the show as all silliness and no satire. But in fact a good number of the skits rely on an understanding of the British class system that’s being subtly attacked to really register in all their outrageousness.

“Americans don’t usually understand class. They think it’s about money,” says Martin Lewis, a producer, longtime friend of the group and expatriate Brit who put together last month’s local retrospective. “It’s not about money, it’s about breeding . The class system is the most omnipresent facet of British life, something that is apparent from the first breath of the day to the last breath at night, because it’s about language and accent and gets everyone instantly pigeonholed. And that was a major part of the Pythons’ sensibility.”

As an example, Lewis points out the famous “nudge nudge, say no more “ sketch--funny enough in a void, but even funnier to those who recognize Idle’s sexually suggestive boor as a lower-middle-class bloke who’s ascended to the nouveau riche without losing his vulgarity, and Jones’ character as a threatened member of the proper, old-fashioned middle class.

One element of “Circus” humor that did easily fly across the Atlantic was the spoofery of the form of television itself.

Says Neil Innes: “I’ve always had the feeling that once the novelty of pictures coming through the sky disappeared and you took it for granted, audiences became much more aware of how television is made, and therefore more open to jokes about it. I think the Pythons were the first ones to do that. I suppose Oliver Stone’s trying it right now (with ‘Natural Born Killers’). They would turn it on its head; they were cubists, in a way.”

The unheralded show became a smash, yet Cleese’s attitude began to noticeably sour during the second season, and he left after the third. Without him around, the level of dissent dropped sharply, but so did the chemistry. The others opted to pack it in after a truncated fourth series, despite the BBC’s entreaties to keep going.

Of Cleese’s ornery unwillingness to celebrate Python, Gilliam says, “I think John keeps trying to put it behind him. I have this terrible feeling that it was a painful time for him in many ways, because he was not the sole voice, with everybody bowing and kowtowing around him. He was the first to get tired of the give-and-take of the group, the battles. And that’s kind of a pity, because he was very good in Python, and some of the stuff came out of that tension. On the other hand, John has enough internal tension that he seems to be able to do it on his own.”

Cleese had a huge “solo” success not long after “Flying Circus” with his “Fawlty Towers,” but was lured back by the promise of feature films. Python didn’t just coast on continuing public good will into this new medium but expanded the troupe’s reach to tap into richer, deeper and more universally relevant veins of dark humor.

The Arthurian spoof “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” was a hit in America as well as England in 1975, and paved the way for U.S. popularity of the TV show.

On 1979’s “Life of Brian,” protests of blasphemy from conservative religious groups--many of whom hadn’t seen the film and didn’t realize the title character was supposed to be a hapless contemporary to, not parodic replacement for, Jesus Christ--actually helped rally viewer interest.

These films and the final, encompassingly episodic “Meaning of Life” moved into headier satirical realms of religion, sexuality, injustices both historical and contemporary, and the eternal problems of existence and death. No longer was the comedy based primarily in zany variations on class hyperconsciousness.

“Well,” says Jones of the thematic evolution in the shift from TV to films, “I suppose you make jokes about men in bowler hats and upper-class twits and it gets less interesting after a while.

“Also, we were children of the ‘60s, and we thought class in England was on its way out; by the time we stopped doing the TV show in the mid-’70s, we thought things were gonna change,” Jones recalls. “What we didn’t know was that we were gonna get 14 years of Thatcherite Tory rule that was gonna drag everything back to where it was before the ‘60s. I think those class targets which were getting a bit passe by the time we finished doing Python have now come back into fashion.”

A s a phenomenon, Monty Py thon won’t die, much to the bemusement and/or irritation of its members. They find the enthusiasm to be far greater in America than in England, partially because the 45 episodes of “Flying Circus” have been airing almost continuously here for over 20 years, whereas the BBC (which Gilliam believes “isn’t quite comfortable with it even now”) has, astonishingly, only rerun the show a few times.

It also may be a fundamental difference of national personalities. “They’re just more into their cults on this side of the ocean,” says Carol Cleveland, known as “the seventh Python” for her frequent non-drag female parts, visiting town to prepare for a one-woman show she’ll present in L.A. next year. In Britain, Cleveland says, “We’re not a cult nation.”

Yet the ditty “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”--sung and whistled by Idle as he hangs dying on a cross at the end of “Life of Brian”--unexpectedly shot to the top of the pop charts in England just two years ago, after football fans there began singing it whenever their teams started losing badly. As a result of this No. 1, Idle even got to sing the tune for the queen at a royal variety performance, albeit with one naughty bit of the lyric replaced.

As “solo” careers go, Idle’s has lately been the most problematic; with a lot of scripts he’s written yet unmade, his corrosive brilliance has been recently relegated to appearing in the likes of “Nuns on the Run” and the upcoming “Casper the Friendly Ghost.”

Jones’ directing career stalled somewhat after his “Erik the Viking,” but he has more scripts in development, and has concentrated lately on a multitude of books. He’ll be here to sign his perversely Pythonesque new children’s tome, “Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book,” on Monday at Book Soup, and his four-part BBC history of the Crusades will air next year on the Learning Channel.

Cleese has amassed a fortune from his TV commercials and management-training film company, which allows him to work at his own snail’s pace. For years he’s been holed up penning the quasi-sequel to the smash 1987 comedy he wrote and starred in, “A Fish Called Wanda”; the new “Death Fish II” (as it may or may not actually be titled) will probably shoot next year, with Cleese, Palin and the other original cast members appearing, reportedly, as similar yet different characters.

Palin’s most recent acclaim has come with two earth-traversing documentary miniseries, “Around the World in 80 Days” and “Pole to Pole,” with a third globe-trot mapped out for after he completes Cleese’s movie.

G illiam’s may be the most imaginative extension of the Python ethos into a new frontier, with a feel for the fantastic as well as mundane, and uneasily incorporating tragedy as well as comedy. Following such revered efforts as “Brazil” and “The Fisher King,” and a lot of recent false starts, his first new film in four years--a time-travel story titled “Twelve Monkeys”--starts shooting next year, with Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis and Madeleine Stowe reportedly starring.

“I think all of us (from Python) take things exceedingly seriously,” Gilliam says. “But rather than mope around and get boring about it, we try to find humorous ways of dealing with it. I’ve probably pulled away more than the others from comedy, even though it’s always part of what I’m doing; I’m enjoying trying to do things that are serious and moving.

“I’m just intrigued how far you can stretch it. I suppose that’s the one thing in common with everything that I’ve played with: How funny can you make it? How tragic can you make it? How beautiful can you make it? How romantic? How grotesque and ugly and disturbing? I want to play with all that stuff and see what you can do.”*