“Monty Python’s Flying Circus: Complete and Annotated...All the Bits”, by Luke Dempsey

 

880 pages, Black Dog & Leventhal, ISBN-13: 978-1579129132 

There were several times when I was a little kid and, being unable to sleep, made my way down to the family room late at night where I’d find my Dad yucking it up over some British comedy show or other on PBS; often it was The Benny Hill Show, but just as often it was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Being but a wee lad, the humor and the topics were all quite beyond me – but not the cartoons; oh, yes, Terry Gilliam’s weird and unique recycling of past photographs and original art were just the greatest things I had even seen. I laughed just as hard at these as my Dad did at the rest of the show. I guess he had an English sense of humor.

So then, I suppose I don’t need to tell you that, if you are not a fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus then you have no reason at all to buy Monty Python’s Flying Circus: Complete and Annotated...All the Bits by Luke Dempsey. This book is a complete encyclopedia of everything Python (that would be Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin): chock full of 2000 color photographs and illustrations, over 1000 annotations to scenes and even reproduced scripts for each of the 45 episodes, with behind the scenes directions. As a Yank, I found All the Bits to be enlightening in the extreme when it came to understanding the context of the show: the social and political milieu of Britain in the late 60s and early 70s in which the Pythons thrived is absolutely vital to understanding the humor of the show – especially British humor, which so often gets lost in translation over here.

And while I thought that reading the scripts and script notes of the show would be a drag, the opposite is actually true, for in doing so I discovered all that I had missed during my initial viewings: the fast-talking, obscure references and unfamiliar slang were all explained and translated for my Yankee ears. All the Bits also illustrates just how much hard work and English cleverness went into producing each episode. I suppose that, on some level, I always knew these mad Englishmen were putting in long hours and stretching their creativity to the max, but All the Bits really brings this fact home in no uncertain terms. So by all means, drop your Norwegian Blue at once and buy Monty Python’s Flying Circus: Complete and Annotated...All the Bits. Albatross.