Cleese, Cruelty, and Conversion

It can be difficult to tease apart the styles of the Monty Python crew. As they grew in stature, their work became increasingly collaborative. As they grew together as a team, their shorthand with each other became easier and more instinctive. The lads themselves resist such categorization. Eric Idle referred to such work as “glib subdivisions”. John Cleese was Monty Python’s biggest draw in 1969 — the show could have easily been “The Cleese Hour”. But Cleese rejected the star dynamic from the outset, insisting that it was the group that created the show, and not the individuals within it.

Still, it’s hard to resist trying to get to the truth of how they did it! When you taste a delicious meal, say rat tart, it’s natural to want to know the ingredients beyond rat and tart. So we assign certain broad characteristics to this member or that member. Michael Palin loved the awkwardness of well-laid plans going awry. Terry Jones loved chaos. The two of them, and Terry Gilliam, leaned into a more cinematic style, as well as a stream-of-consciousness flow. Eric Idle preferred wordplay, a man saying silly things into the camera. Chapman tended the absurd, even when he wasn’t drunk.

Cleese was the cruel one.

We can look to the Parrot sketch for an example of this; two Brits bartering over a feathered corpse, tossing it about, banging its head against the cage — sure, that’s cruel. But a deeper cut gives us an example of deeper cuts. A sketch, much like the Parrot sketch in format, involves a man (Cleese) walking into a pet shop to buy a cat. The clerk (Palin) doesn’t have a cat but tries to upsell him a terrier. Cleese refuses, his heart set on a cat. “Tell you what,” Palin replies, all shifty. “I’ll file its legs down a bit, take its snout out, stick a few wires through its cheeks. There you are, a lovely pussy cat.” Cleese protests that it wouldn’t be a proper cat, as it wouldn’t meow. “Well, it’d howl a bit.”

Now, that’s cruel.

This is not a sketch that Palin, Jones, or Idle would have ever written. Gilliam, perhaps, would have been capable of converting a pet, but only in the context of his absurd dream-like animations where everything is reduced to parts and shapes. This is different. Cleese and Chapman propose taking an actual dog and surgically altering it to turn it into a cat, a bird, or a fish. They even admit that it would be painful to the dog, which only adds to the gleeful malice of the sketch.

The sketch is so edgy, even today, that one wonders if it would ever be accepted or broadcast in the current media environment. Everyone would object — showrunners, the performers, standards, and practices, even the audience if it ever came to that. If such a sketch were broadcast, the outrage from organizations such as PETA would be huge and vociferous. Cleese would spend the rest of his life running from paint-wielding animal lovers. Everyone would object, with good reason — the sketch is objectionable. It’s funny as hell, but it’s objectively objectionable.

The other members of Monty Python understood this. They knew that Cleese and Chapman preferred sketches with a degree of shock value. But where most showrunners and producers would try to squelch or neuter these outlier pieces, the Monty Python team went the other way. They had Cleese’s back and folded this vein of cruelty into their silly mosaic. Instead of appointing themselves the Gatekeepers protecting the sensibilities of the zeitgeist, they trusted that if the sketch made them laugh despite the cruelty, it would make the audience laugh as well.

When members of Monty Python discuss sketches they performed that perhaps went too far, they all seem to evoke the Undertaker sketch. In this sketch, Cleese goes to the undertaker, played by a crazed Chapman, and asks for help in burying his mother. Chapman, tactless and obscene, opine on the relative virtues between burial and cremation; “Well, they’re both nasty.” But when Cleese shows Chapman his dead mother (having had the foresight to bring her along in a sack,) Chapman takes it up a notch, declaring that she’s “an eater.”

Well!

From the minute they read the sketch at the start of the season, the others knew they couldn’t do it, couldn’t possibly do it. They were starting to get some heat from the BBC, and this sketch, in particular, was so needlessly confrontational. But they had to admit — it was funny. So they attempted to reconceive the sketch so that it would work. They placed it in a conceptually confrontational show, the “Queen will be Watching” episode (№26.) They put a cannibalism sketch in front of it, a shipwrecked crew of men arguing about who should eat who. (Not sure who wrote this sketch, but it feels like Palin.) They put in a quick link of an upright Jones insisting that there be “no more cannibalism!” thereby creating the expectation of more cannibalism. Finally, as if to anticipate the outrage they would receive, they cued the audience to boo the sketch, to groan at the jokes instead of laugh, to heckle “Let’s have something decent!”, and to storm the stage. But they performed the sketch, with all of its naughty bits attached.

The trust and faith the lads had for one another established a gold standard for the industry, and it paid off in one of the best shows in the history of television. The group chose to create instead of control, to accept the visions of the other members, as well as the anticipated outrage, and find a way to weave it all together into the work. They chose to let the terrier be a terrier, instead of filing its legs down, taking its snout out, and sticking wires through its cheeks.

PETA would be proud.