In an unverified poll I just took in my head, I’m pretty sure that 95% of all the creative people I know both professionally and personally (and that I think are funny) were all exposed to Monty Python at a young age.  I’ve just cracked it!  You want to be funny, watch Monty Python’s Flying Circus!

Okay, so that might be a little on the hyperbole side of the dial, but it is true that Monty Python made a gigantic impact on the world of comedy that has left ripples flowing across the landscape for decades.  So much more than a sketch show, the Flying Circus broke the mold in the way we poke fun at politicians, governments, celebrities, and social issues.

 It was surreal and yet grounded, constantly keeping you on your feet with never ending mash ups of the familiar and the irrational.  They tossed the rules aside and let sketches blend together or even just end abruptly.  It left viewers off balance, uncertain, and begging for more.

The Pythons (Cleese, Idle, Jones, Palin, Chapman, Gilliam and the honorary girl Carol Cleveland) forged a new system to attack social concerns with a brutality only possible in their theater of the absurd.  I’m not sure their targets knew what was happening, but the fans picked up on it and devoured every minute of controlled insanity.  Just when you thought you knew where you were, Gilliam’s animation bumpers would come in and scoop your brain out.  It was a mecca of crazy and it was generally “bust a gut” hilarious.

I guess Python seemed so normal to me because I was exposed to the show very early on in my life.  It wasn’t an oddity or something I heard about in whispers or in interviews with comedians.  So, I’ve never really sat back and thought about its cultural relevance until a few days ago when my friend David said, “and that is the second Python I’ve met in my life.”  Wow, so it’s a goal then to meet as many as you can?  I’d always perceived that sort of fandom as reserved for the Trekkies of the world.  I suppose then that the Dead Parrot is to laughter as the Enterprise is to space travel.

What is truly fantastic about Monty Python is once you see it and fall in love with it, a whole giant tree branches out before you.  The cast has gone on to do so much more since Flying Circus ceased in 1974.  Beyond the Python movies and informal reunions etc., each member has been actively creating and entertaining with projects ranging from books, to plays, to musicals and beyond.  Terry Gilliam is widely considered one of the most creative independent filmmakers working today and John Cleese is easily one of the most recognizable faces in comedy.  And if you haven’t seen Michael Palin’s travel docs, you should be hit on the head by a knight with a raw chicken.

Their legacy continues to this day with a YouTube channel, documentaries, slippers, t-shirts, even a card game!  Monty Python’s Flying Circus was a watershed moment in popular culture.  Thoughtful, original, brilliantly funny, unexplainable, and the very definition of wacky, the Pythons have informed generations of comedy leaving an eternal impact on our lives.