NEW YORK — Monty Python’s Flying Circus took to the stage Thursday night, a little grayer and minus (almost) the troupe’s one deceased player — but no slower on the draw, with shots aimed at each other and even the occasional adoring audience member.
The iconic (mostly) British comedy team collaborated on a borderline inexplicable sketch comedy series 40 years ago that featured gay lumberjacks, cheese shops that sold no cheese, pet shops that sold dead parrots and Cardinal Richelieu reining Spanish Inquisition terror on unsuspecting 20th-century Britons.
They remain as popular as ever and their story is the subject of a 6-hour documentary, Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut), which premieres on the IFC channel this week. Their collective appearance to promote the piece packed the 1,100-seat Ziegfeld Theatre despite the first-come, first-served ticket policy that kept hundreds waiting for hours outside on a cold and rainy evening.
The event was billed as a “reunion” but it barely qualified: Monty Python‘s five remaining members— John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and American Terry Gilliam (Graham Chapman died in 1988 of cancer) — seem to have kept in touch, have no serious grudges, performed nothing (though an audience member did — more on that later), appeared on stage together only three years ago and, let’s face it, did do a bloody documentary together.
Still, the creative rivalries that fueled three seasons of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and four feature films later on, were fully on display as the comedians fielded questions submitted on index cards by audience members who had just been treated to an hour or so taste of the film.
“What is the biggest regret of your career … Michael,” Cleese read (mostly) from a question card, picking his target. Palin paused, then obliged: “I wish I had been born a man. It’s been a right battle.”
Another fan wanted to know how it’s possible to tell, just by watching, who wrote a particular sketch. Palin fielded that one: “Laughter — from mine.”
“This one is for Graham,” Cleese said, looking seriously at the life-size cardboard torso cutout of Chapman occupying one of the six seats onstage. “As the dead one, how much creative input do you have?”
Most embarrassing moment? Cleese was up first: “When the Queen came to watch, and my trousers fell down.”
Idle: “That wasn’t ‘the’ Queen — that was ‘a’ queen.”
Palin: “Graham just said he was ‘a friend.'”
“How many Frenchman can’t be wrong,” one questioner asked in a strained attempt to paraphrase a line from a Marx Brothers movie. “You’re at the wrong reunion,” Idle told him.
Another member of the audience was invited on stage to perform her rendition of the famous Spanish Inquisition sketch. The fact that she was 10 years old may have had something to do with that largesse. You do not follow or review children, but there is video.
The team actually did recall a genuine embarrassing moment, which occurred when they happened to be shooting in Germany. Of course, it isn’t that simple, and nobody in the audience actually saw it coming.
“What about that very funny thing that happened at Auschwitz?” Cleese said, in all seriousness, to embarrassed laughter from the crowd.
“It was actually Dachau,” Idle corrected, the audience now pealing in laughter but still not quite sure what to make of it. Their German hosts, it seems, as part of a cultural penance, perhaps, wanted to show their British guests the notorious former concentration camp, now a memorial to the more than 25,000 prisoners who died there during World War II.
“We got there, and it was closed,” Idle explained, to even more laughter. “And Graham (Chapman) said, ‘Tell them we’re Jewish,'” he recalled, to a now completely inconsolable audience. “They let us in.”
