Definitely Not My Favorite Python, But Probably the Most Pythonesque Python for All That

I've talked about Michael Palin's fascinatingly comprehensive and yet un-critical diaries, John Cleese's funny and sometimes scary arguments with himself, and Terry Gilliam's hauntingly familiar and yet frustratingly disconnected ruminations. Since Terry Jones has, tragically, descended into dementia and Graham Chapman is, equally tragically, dead, that leaves Eric Idle, the only musician among the Python's, easily their most savvy, business-smart, and traditionally ambitious member, the one with the strongest sense of old-fashioned showmanship, and by far the one with the most immature and sexist sense of humor, as the final member of Monty Python to produces his memoirs. Now he's done so, and it's great. I'm not certain I have a lot more to say beyond that, though.

Palin's diaries (and I really need to finally get around to reading the final volume) are documents of their time, the impossibly detailed and often quietly funny observations of, so it seemed to me, a smart man to likes looking at and reacting thoughtfully to and learning from the world around him--but not someone who is especially drawn to challenging or questioning or struggling with it. John Cleese's autobiography of his early years, on the other hand, was endless challenges and questions and struggles, mostly with himself and his own prejudices and judgments and assumptions (but often with others' as well, of course). Terry Gilliam's scrapbook-slash-autobiography painted a scattered portrait of man kind of unhappy with himself, but not too much, because he understands his own pre-occupations and the fact that they have driven him all over the map, and only occasionally coalesce around a project or a work of art or a relationship upon which he use his powers to create something great. Idle, though? Idle is man who survived some very difficult times, worked very hard, got very lucky, reaped great rewards, loves all of it, and doesn't think too much about What It All Means. It is probably the closest thing I have ever read to a genuine, straight-up, celebrity memoir, with names dropped on page after page after page, all done with absolute cheer and never a recrimination. Well, that's not entirely true; he really does seem genuinely contrite about the way he cheated left and right on his first wife, but once he gets past his not-particularly-embarrassed confession of having been a sex-obsessed asshole for years, it really doesn't trouble him, presumably at least in part because he was making enough money to sufficiently cover up any regrets that anyone had about his behavior.

Idle is, I think, in addition to all that I wrote above (indeed, probably in ways centrally connected to all of that) easily the most American of all the Pythons. He moved permanently to the U.S. in the early 1990s--and not just America, but Hollywood--after getting annoyed at the response to his latest film, Splitting Heirs ("If that's how you behave when someone brings eight million back to spend in the country, I shall take my flops to America, where they don't even mind if you are successful"--p. 172). And he loves it here--he loves the individualism, the opportunity, the chance to do one thing, and then do a completely different thing, and face no resistance whatsoever (so long, of course, as you're a funny, rich, white male with tons of celebrity friends, which Idle never pretends he isn't). Gilliam came to England and found, for all his frustrations with the way it changed in the 1970s and 1980s, a grounded culture and way of being in the world which spoke to him; Idle, by contrast, the child of abandonment and abuse and relative poverty, never seems at all interested in finding any kind of permanent ground at all. Again, that's not entirely true; he is utterly smitten with his American wife and dearly loves and cares for the many friends and connections he has built for himself over the years. But he's probably never really stopped being the sneaky, on-the-hunt smart-ass which his upbringing taught him to be--and again, why should it? His humor and sense of fun brought him into the orbit of everyone from George Harrison (their friendship is a large and delightful part of the book) to David Bowie to Robin Williams to Michael Caine to Mike Nichols to Peter Cook to Mick Jaggar (lots of guys, you're thinking? yes, I noticed) to dozens and dozens more. Why change--or rather, why change the constant changing--when what you're doing seems to work?

Monty Python was, in the end, a brilliant comedic troupe of people who made smart, snotty, silly fun of everyone. They were not serious satirists (though they could do that, when they thought it appropriate), but rather among the most absurdist snarkers ever. By that measure, hats off to the snarkiest one of them all. He's always looked on the bright side of his life, and good for him. I hope he never stops (and neither does he, that's for certain).

All Right, so Maybe Terry Gilliam is Actually My Favorite Python. (Or Maybe Not.)

I suppose this is becoming a bit of a series. When I read the first volume of Michael Palin's diaries, I ended up thinking for a while why I liked the man's work so much, and what it meant. When I read John Cleese's autobiography, I did the same. And now comes Gilliamesque, an impressionistic, coffee-table type collection of ruminations, photos, artwork and other errata that more or less gives Terry Gilliam, the most visually adventurous and unpredictable of the Pythons, a chance to tell the story of his life. And it's a story which I happened to find sometimes unsettling, because I could see so much of myself in it, leading me to wonder if I wouldn't have more in common with Gilliam than all of the other members of Monty Python.

Maybe that's silly. (And heaven forbid that any discussion of the Pythons be silly.) Still, Palin's and Cleese's stories made me think about their contribution to Monty Python's comedy, and what that contribution meant for how we understand British comedy, or England in the 1970s, or the postwar world of popular entertainment, or all three. But Gilliam's story instead kept making me think about my own early life. He grew up in a rural environment, surrounded by animals, exploring and fishing and hunting (and eating the food he and his family and neighbors caught or killed or raised and slaughtered). He grew up in a church-going family, with the church as the center of his social life, and read the Bible well enough that he still remembers all the stories. He got into trouble with his parents for partaking of elements of pop culture which they disapproved of. He was an ambitious Boy Scout, but had conflicts with his Scout leaders. He went to a religious university, where his closest friends were snarky but definitely non-radical malcontents. Again and again, while I didn't have many experiences at all similar to his (we were in Washington State, not Minnesota and California; we were pretty stable financially, not poor like his family; we were committed Mormons, not the denominationally easy-going Protestants the Gilliams were; etc.), I kept stumbling across retrospective reflections from Gilliam that read exactly like statements which I could imagine, with only a little fine tuning, coming out of my mouth. What he says about animal husbandry ("I've always wondered how city kids learn these things....I think anyone who eats meat (as I do) should spend a few hours in a [slaughterhouse] at some point in their lives, just to understand the process you're a part of"--pp. 6-7), or scripture ("I do think the generations who've grown up without learning the Bible...have really missed out. Stories like David and Bathsheba are the building blocks of our culture, but who knows Bathsheba now? Who even knows David?"--p. 11), or college ("What I ended up leaving with was something much more valuable: the ability to question some--if not all--of the assumptions I'd grown up with, and to carry on questioning them if I didn't like the look of the answers I was getting"--p. 40) strike me as personal truth. Discovering that one of the Pythons actually appears to have constructed his self-understanding along lines and through experiences that actually resonate so much with me personally was a strange surprise.

Unfortunately, there's little in Gilliamesque which implies much connection between Terry Gilliam's life and worldview and his Python work (which wasn't at all the case with either Palin or Cleese; the men who came through in those diaries and in that autobiography clearly are very much present in the Python writers and performers they otherwise were). Is that because Gilliam, looking back at work that he did more than 45 years ago, doesn't think it was all that significant? It's hard to avoid that conclusion, which I think is a missed opportunity. When he talks about his method as "taking images out of their original contexts" and "I'd find [images of] people in serious situations--soldiers in wartime, politicians on the campaign trail--and liberate them by putting them in a dress or making them do something ridiculous" (p. 126), he's expressing his blunt, farcical, burlesque attitude toward the world around him. Basically, Gilliam comes across as a man who is thoroughly aware that there really are--or at least that many people really believe there are, or at the very least really think there ought to be--great and good things out there in the world and universe (his references to fine architecture throughout the book are near-reverential), and he has no interest in undermining those great and good things...he just wants to poke them in the eye and slip a whoopee cushion under their butts. Understanding this about the man opens up something about his relationship to the rest of the Pythons which he never explores, I think: if everyone else was, on one level or another, either railing against or making their reluctant peace with or passive-aggressively undercutting the internally-collapsing-but-still-operative social world of Ye Olde England, Gilliam, the foreigner, just unapologetically loved it, because it gave him so much that he could happily blow raspberries at.

And he really does love England, or at least the England he fell in love with. From his very first visit to the UK, Gilliam describes himself as experiencing an "enhanced sense of security and well-being" (p. 89), and he finds himself feeling a genuine sadness that the bustling yet cloistered and somewhat rundown life that he got to know when he first arrived--"from the late sixties even into the seventies, London still functioned like an ancient city...things where still being made there, there was a proper mixed economy" (p. 120)--was remade by Thatcher and global capitalism into (in his view) an ersatz copy of the always-closing-the-deal New York City he briefly thought he liked, but actually hated and feared. One might suspect that the steady work he found with Python, and the career doors it opened for him, were more valued by Gilliam because of the crash-course in High Absurd Englishness it offered him, and not for anything actually doing the animation for, or eventually performing in, episodes of Flying Circus actually taught him.

So what is important to him? And what really does connect, artistically and otherwise, with the story of his life? His movies, of course. But unfortunately, from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen on Gilliam sees to have operated outside his own muse, occasionally poking at it with a stick, curiously, at least as much as he's actually inhabited it. (Gilliam essentially admits as much at one point, at the end of his account of making 12 Monkeys: "When I look back at the Brazil me, he was still going strong--unstoppably even, at least in his own mind--whereas that's not so much the case from the nineties onward. Where did that guy go? You could say it was Munchausen's syndrome that did it for him...except that it wasn't the syndrome, it was real"--p. 241). Gilliam's ability to harness his own bric-a-brac-filled sense of ridiculousness to something that generates a real, meaningful cinematic story hasn't disappeared entirely: much of it was on display in 12 Monkeys, The Fisher King, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and there was even a surprise return to some of it in The Zero Theorem--which Gilliam curiously refers to as a "period film" (p. 281), which makes me want to see that not-great-but-better-than-I-thought-it-would-be movie again. Still, everyone--including Gilliam himself--recognizes that 1985's Brazil was the only time he truly pulled all his talents together into a single, powerful package. His long reconstruction of the angers (Margaret Thatcher's seemingly sadomasochistic control over Parliament), regrets (why hadn't he done the missionary thing and gone to Africa to serve humankind?), fears (Ronald Reagan is actually President of the United States?!), pre-occupations (all the beautiful architectural remnants of Britain's industrial and imperial past, being abandoned or turned into luxury flats), loves (his father, while working construction, got a long nail stuck in his eye and he just drove himself home?), and curiosities (so how do pneumatic tubes work anyway?), which led him to construct such a visually splendid, intellectually challenging, satirically hilarious, and ultimately disturbing cinematic story was, for me, the absolute highlight of the book (pp. 199-205). His snarky comments about Robert De Niro are pretty great too.

So Gilliam--not the film director he might have been, but a talented and fascinating man. Probably not my favorite member of Monty Python, the comedy troupe, but quite possibly the one I'd most like to meet. Now, Eric Idle and Terry Jones, hurry up and write your books, so I can complete this series, okay?

Why John Cleese is, and isn't, My Favorite Python Either

The title of this post is a reference to this old post of mine, which I wrote after reading the first volume of Michael Palin's diaries. (Palin is a wonderfully detailed, and really rather strangely fascinating--not to mention often funny--self-chronicler, but after digesting his second volume, I never went on to the third.) Of course, every Monty Python fan knows that when John Cleese and Palin performed together, not just laughs but absolute comic brilliance was within reach: I mean, you've got The Cheese Shop, The Argument Clinic, The Fish-Slapping Dance, and, of course, The Parrot Sketch. We know what Palin brought to that equation: a kind of preternaturally, unintentionally unnerving normality, or at least naivete. Cleese, however, brought the anger--or perhaps a strangeness, which he was also almost always vaguely (or viciously!) angry about. And now that I've read his wonderful memoir So, Anyway..., I can testify: John Cleese, at least insofar as he chooses to present himself here, is a very strange and unsettling man.

He's also terrifically funny, of course--a smart comic writer, a gifted physical comedian (another great Cleese-Palin combination there), and a man capable of some of the greatest slow burns and insane outbursts in the whole history of any media....but undeniably strange. Reading Cleese's presentation of his early life (the memoir runs from his family history and birth up to the founding of Monty Python in 1969, then almost entirely skips the next 45 years to conclude with Cleese's take on the Pythons' wonderfully nostalgic--and sometimes actually, genuinely funny--live farewell show) convinces me that much of his skill at making us laugh is in fact because of his strangeness. Remember that the same root which gives us "strange" also gives us "estrangement," and Cleese shows himself in this book as constantly on the edge of feeling at least partially estranged from, and thus confused and even sometimes terrified by, almost everything. That includes his parents, his school teachers, his fellow students, women in general, the various techniques and technologies of both performing live and performing on film or television, the vicissitudes and opportunities of university life, and really just about everyone who seemed more capable of negotiating and/or escaping from the perceptions and expectations of the English class system--Cleese is very emphatic about his origins in the "middle-middle-lower-middle class" (pg. 30)--than he. And finally--and this is really the most important part of Cleese's psyche, I think--he is deeply bothered by his own frequent sense of estrangement, alienation, and disconnection. There is, in short, a deeply self-focused anger about the man, a separation from himself that sometimes comes off as a clinical fascination with his own overwrought thought processes (there are multiple moments in the book when he, as he reconstructs various triumphs and failures, essentially recollects that the worst thing he too often does is "think about thinking"--pg. 250), but sometimes also borders on self-contempt. It's a fascinating psychological journey to be taken on, though of course because Cleese is a talented man who has had some marvelously fun opportunities in his life and has met and been influenced by (and sometimes made enemies of) some truly remarkable people, following that psychological journey is made all the more entertaining.

Does this make Cleese my favorite Python? I don't know. It's absolutely clear that without him, Monty Python would have never existed, at least not in the form it did: he was the only one who had, at one point or another (either while at Cambridge, or while on tour with the Footlights in America, or while writing and performing for various BBC television shows in the early to mid-1960s), met and worked with and had access to every single person that made the Flying Circus possible: not just all the other five members of the troupe, but the directors and consultants and managers who were familiar with and liked Cleese's work, and thus opened the BBC's doors to them. And it's widely recognized that the Flying Circus's fourth season, which Cleese didn't participate it, is the weakest of the four...though that's also the season where the more clearly cinematic imaginations of Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam are most visible. (Cleese is fervently proud of--and deservedly so!--A Fish Called Wanda, probably because he recognizes that he is first and last a sketch artist, a writer of "good jokes and funny scenes," who has "managed to write only one really good film script in fifty years"--pgs. 354-355.) Mostly I would have to say that, if Palin was the most adaptable, open-minded, and likeable Python, then Cleese was the most essential Python, the man who was, however unexpectedly--the notion that success simply fell into his lap without him knowing what he was doing is a constant theme throughout the book--the constant and reliable font of the raw comic materials which allowed all the others to become catalysts for.

It needs to be said that Cleese's memoir is a great one to argue with and wonder about--a result that he almost certainly would be pleased with. He has opinions on everyone from P.G. Wodehouse ("a very good comic writer rather than a great one"--pg. 26) to Peter Sellers ("the greatest impersonators often have strangely colourless personalities"--pg. 339), on everything from Americans' often money-grabbing lack of any sense of vocation (pgs. 210-211) to  how photographic technology has made the relationship between fans and celebrities even worse (pgs. 321-322). The stories of his awakening to the fact that he was surrounded by gays and lesbians in the arts world around him, and his reaction to his writing partner Graham Chapman's coming out are hilarious--and revealing of how very much Cleese was shaped by the preferences and prejudices of his ordered, rural, moderately-if-not-truly poor, conservative upbringing in Weston-super-Mare, despite no longer holding to many of those expectations (pgs. 210-211, 305-307). He's a man of easy resentments, if only because his longings for the world so often revolve around rules which he remains attached to, even as he beats up himself over that fact. The political ignorance he sometimes shows--the man thinks, at least in this book, overwhelming about how things affect him, and almost never how they might affect other people--is embarrassing, but forgivable. He has given his readers here, I think, a great document of someone living through the disappearance--or has it, really?--of the old English class-bound world. The fact that it came from someone's whose own writing and acting played a not insignificant role is teaching us all the naughty delight of kicking that world while it was on its last legs is just icing on the cake.

Didn't Monty Python Already Do This?

Oh yes, they did. But this one is good too. Plus, until anyone tells me otherwise, I'm going to assume it's completely accurate.

"So. Don't Eat Them."

I didn't know I needed this tonight, but I did. Oh, how I did.



How does "resumptory frictation" compare with "prefabulated amulite," I wonder?

Why Michael Palin is, and isn't, My Favorite Python

Having recently finished reading the wonderful, revealing, and somewhat curious first volume of Michael Palin's diaries, and having recently finished watching the last of his many television journeys around the world, I feel a need to say something about Mr. Palin. He's a fabulous writer, a witty conversationalist, a skilled media performer, and a very funny man. My favorite Python, though? That's hard to say.

If you claim that Michael Palin is your favorite member of Monty Python, you're not really saying anything controversial. His enormous popularity speaks for itself--the Royal Geographic Society didn't invite him to be their honorary president for nothing. He's the key player in my all-time favorite Flying Circus skit (if I can ever say "no" to a student with half the timing Palin demonstrates at 2:16, I'll die a happy man). He has a tremendous range, from flustered weakness to strong-armed smarm. All of the Python's express nothing but fondness and admiration for him as a man and a co-worker; John Cleese himself has said that there's no Python he'd rather work with than Palin.

And yet...maybe that's too easy; maybe Palin is to Python as Paul McCartney is to the Beatles. He wasn't Python's best comic actor (that was Graham Chapman), nor its fiercest visionary (that's the two Terrys, Jones and Gilliam), nor the best at wordplay (Eric Idle). And then there's Cleese--a near-unmatchable physical comedian and, more than that, someone whose whole comic perspective has been profoundly shaped (or so it has often seemed to me) by his own sometimes-angry, sometimes-aristocratic engagement with Britain's class system. Perhaps that's it: Cleese--and, to greater or lesser degrees, all the other Pythons--seem to be willing, on occasion, to get angry; to engage in critique. Palin isn't.

This comes out, again and again, in his diaries. Now to be sure, my knowledge of Britain (and, specifically, England and London) in the 1970s is minimal at best. And moreover, it's not as though Palin--whose diaries are a marvelous display of an inveterate record-keeper at work--had any kind of obligation when he was writing this entries to systematically critique or evaluate his social, cultural, or political environment(s). Still, as much as I loved all his little idiosyncratic and insightful observations on the pop culture world which he and the Pythons came to dominate through the 70s--Bruce Springsteen comes off like Billy Graham (pg. 266), Ringo Starr is dangerously deep into booze (pg. 484), Mark Hamill looks like a chirpy delivery boy (pg. 560), and more--I kept waiting for him to, well, say something about the world that was changing, and changing in ways that could not be turned back, all around him. Changes that he was, in fact, very much a part of, though perhaps I can only say so now that spent years thinking about the connection between culture and economy.

Early on Palin is contemptuous of the Heath government, and describes himself as a "fervent socialist" (pg. 71)--but he's a socialist with a sympathy for and a love of the kind of local life that his neighborhood in London affords him; when he talks about his ideal form of urban planning ("open play area[s] at least twice the size of the car park...severe restrictions on cars in central London...space indoors and outdoors, where people would want to stop and gather"--pg. 66) he sounds very much like he was anticipating New Urbanism. And yet...he never seems to reflect upon what kind of costs or limits which preserving or promoting such environments might entail. On the one hand, he's a cosmopolitan: a trip to Dorset leads him to write rather condescendingly of the "oppressive weight of years of tradition" experienced in the country, and describes himself as "hopelessly and happily corrupted by the richness of London life" (pg. 200). On the other hand, he grouses about the decimilization of English streets and phone numbers (pg. 55), and leans towards a "no" vote in the 1973 referendum about whether Britain should stay in the European Community (pg. 238). He celebrates the liberation of British culture, taking delight in the new freedoms of expression and sex around him (pg. 326), and admits that he feels like a fraud when speaking with the vicar who performed his first son's christening (pg. 56), but is never really able to figure out if he believes in God or not (pg. 594). Meanwhile, the strikes and power-outages of the late 70s are grist for morbid humor for him, and when Margaret Thatcher arrives in 1979 and lowers tax rates, he figures he's probably become about 10,000 pounds richer in a single day (he admits that "there is some inescapable lack of social justice" in the budget, but that "it doesn't keep me awake"--pg. 559).

Palin, in short, comes off, slowly but surely, entry after entry, as a smart but uncritical man, or at least not a man at all interested, ultimately, in orienting his life or his commentary about such around a critique of his and his friends' and his country's situation. He's not ideological; he's not a troubled person; he's living the best ordinary life he can. Which, of course, makes him great fun to read--not to mention showing off his own devotion to his children and family. But given the troubled times he lived through, I wanted something more.

Of course, for those who are intellectually inclined (like myself), any period of time can be understood as a time of crisis, a troubled time in need of diagnosis and assessment. So it's really rather foolish to be bothered to discover that an excerpted collection of diary entries, three to four decades old, written by a comedian and television and film actor, seems to lack much of that at all. Yet I am still somewhat bothered by it, by the lack of anger or regret or resolve which comes through Palin's basically generous, optimistic, pedestrian prose. Perhaps I can blame Crooked Timber for this. My knowledge of Britain in the early 80s was, for years, the product of the Reagan-era American conservative celebration of Margaret Thatcher; I'd heard about the Miner's Strike and such, but had no appreciation of what it seemed like to those who were there. Two CT bloggers--Chris Bertram and Harry Brighouse--have shared their thoughts and memories of that traumatic event often, and the firm conclusion I've come to from talking with them and following their links is pretty simple: that by the early 80s Britain had become so transformed, so urban and advanced in its needs and expectations, so capable and presuming of economic flexibility, that the rigid particulars of the postwar British social contract--a contract in which the National Union of Mineworkers played a huge role--simply weren't workable any longer. In 1974 Palin considered the Three-Day Week a tool in the Tory propaganda war, and saw the Heath government's moves against strikers as sinister and Orwellian (pg. 156); by 1979, Palin was delighted to learn that, thanks to Thatcher's spending cuts, Shepperton Studios (which Palin was a board member of) could rent an additional stage from the surrounding community (which was desperate for income) for cheap (pg. 572). I'm not saying his views changed; I have no evidence of that. I'm saying the terrain shifted under his feet, making what worked for the miners in 1974 incapable of replication in 1984...and that meant that, for better or worse, Britain was a different sort of country by the time the decade ended: a stronger country, perhaps, but also a harsher one. Unreasonable demand though it may be, I wanted to see Palin recognize that.

Some people did, even if they were artists and entertainers. The following passage, from a tribute to Morrissey, seems to express it well:

1983, the year of "This Charming Man," is the year the '80s became the '80s. Up until that point, Thatcherism in England and Reaganism in the United States had been little more than hollow promises. Then interest rates fell, the two economies thawed, and spandex was everywhere. It was the year of Flashdance at the box office, of "Every Breath You Take" and Thriller on the Billboard 100; the year of Risky Business and The Big Chill. If this list doesn't make you want to crawl into your bolt hole–well, you are probably not a Smiths fan. I think the word that best captures the times is heartless, as evident in the stupid rictus of Sting's face, circa 1983, as it was in Margaret Thatcher's budget cuts. No wonder Morrissey's voice sounded so fresh, so slyly subversive. As much as he publicly avowed a hatred of Thatcher, culminating in "Margaret at the Guillotine," it was Thatcherism that made Morrissey. The Iron Lady represented a hardness of purpose, a pitilessness that would allow England once again to produce winners. But also, inevitably, losers.

A country of winners and losers, as opposed to the mostly poor, compromised-but-still-traditional, apologetically-egalitarian-but-not-really country that, if Palin's diaries are any guide, was an empty shell by the end of the 70s. And who knows? Perhaps it was terminal, just waiting for the final crisis to knock it over, for much longer than that; perhaps one of the reasons the Pythons saw relatively little need for active satire, and instead preferred outrageous absurdity, was because the world around them, the pretension that the Queen was on her throne and all was in its place, already seemed by the end of the 60s simply ridiculous: a fallen social structure, just ripe for being kicked when it was down, especially since the powers that be didn't know that it was already gasping for breath on the floor. (It is revealing, perhaps, that one of the few times Palin does come of as genuinely angry is in his recounting of his and Cleese's infamous "debate" over The Life of Brian with Malcom Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark; in Palin's words, Stockwood sat there, "resplendent in his purple bishop's cassock...fingering his spectacles and cross with great dexterity," accusing Palin and Cleese of wicked mockery "with all the smug and patronising paraphernalia of the gallery-player, who believes that the audience will see he is right, because he is a bishop and we're not"--pg. 595.)

Well, Thatcher's Britain, the Britain after the Miner's Strike, the Britain of Morrissey and more, was certainly a land of winners and losers--and by the time Palin and the bishop clashed in 1979, it must have been obvious to just about everyone who the winner of that contest was going to be. The writing must have been on the wall for years; indeed, in a sense Palin's diaries are themselves a transcription of such: of the slow, perhaps inevitable gestation of the modern capitalist Britain, needing only the neoliberalism of Thatcher and Co. to kick away the legs of a social order that, thanks in no small degree to Monty Python itself, was probably already hollowed out through and through. So in the end, I guess I'm saying I wish Palin's writings showed a little self-consciousness; a little awareness of how his own life choices and work were part of the trouble (and, of course, the gains and the laughter) of a changing decade. If nothing else, such a realization would certainly make for a good joke.

Though actually, in fact, it did:



I suppose I need to read the second volume of Palin's diaries, to see if there's any behind-the-scenes story to that gag. If there is, whether it reveals any self-consciousness or not, I'm sure Palin will be able to tell it well.

"Is It a Quantity Surveyor?"

With all this talk about motorcycle repairmen, and the virtues of working with one's hands, virtues perhaps entirely out of the reach of the high-powered knowledge economy supermen which dominate our headlines, it's worth noting that Monty Python noticed the enduring authority of those who can fix things decades ago:



I can't quite figure out the link to international communism, but if we let the folks arguing about Crawford's book over at Front Porch Republic loose on it, I bet they could come up with something.