Life of Python: The slap-happy Brit humor has aged like fine Spam

Two things no one expects:

1. The Spanish Inquisition.

2. A reunion of Monty Python's Flying Circus any time soon.

3. To be able to watch "Monty Python's Spamalot" on a couch in your underpants.

Broadway still discourages attire that casual, but the success of "Spamalot" — this year's Tony winner for best musical, director and featured performer — has dislodged material on DVD that's perfectly panty-friendly.

While stage musicals made from movies like "Big" and "Titanic" give off the reek of creative bankruptcy, "Spamalot" — adapted by Python Eric Idle from 1975's "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" — has sparked renewed interest in the bizarre English team considered by some people, somewhere, as the Beatles of comedy.

So until there's a touring production of "Spamalot" in the next year or two, you can still glut yourself on Pythonalia like Mr. Creosote, the regurgitating diner from "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life."

There are two new DVDs, one relatively new one and a not-so-new but wonderfully hernia-inducing book, as well as a new film this summer.

"The Pythons" Autobiography by The Pythons (Orion, $60, 2003) weighs about 6 pounds, and contains lots of rare images and everything you want to know about the individual Pythons and the group's history, the classic show and the films.

The DVDs

First, two TV shows from the period after the five of the six boys had toiled as writers on "The Frost Report" for David Frost and before they became Pythons in 1969. Both feature a second disc of extras including cast interviews.

"Do Not Adjust Your Set" (Tango Entertainment, 1967, unrated). From the box: "The classic series that led to the creation of Monty Python." Featuring future Pythons Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, with David Jason and Denise Coffey, the children's sketch comedy show was hip and offbeat enough at the time to make adults rush home from work.

Much of its short, slapstick material hasn't exactly aged like a fine cheese. A recurring "Captain Fantastic" bit with Jason — as a markedly unfantastic chap with a mustache and hat, for instance chasing a walking tree — is agonizing.

And the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, which performs one Calypso song in black-face, seems like a Benny-Hillesque parody now.

But there are some funny seeds of what was to come later, such as a sketch in which a man reads his long grocery list to shopkeeper Palin, who then hands the man a tin of shoe polish. (See the Python "Cheese Shop" and "Dead Parrot" sketches.)

Note also the Python element that they especially admired in the work of "Goon Show" radio host Spike Milligan: the elimination of the punch line.

In interview supplements that encompass both shows, Jones recalls that he and Palin had grown too frustrated writing for others previously and seeing their work mangled.

Also, look for the odd flub or misstep in both shows. They were recorded more or less live because of the prohibitive time and money required to physically cut the tapes for editing. In one sketch, a couple of actors carry on even as a cup of tea gets spilled on them.

"At Last the 1948 Show" (Tango Entertainment, 1967, unrated). From the box: "The classic series that preceded and inspired Monty Python." It features future Pythons John Cleese and Graham Chapman, with Marty Feldman (whose hilarious bug eyes could whip the eyes of the Runaway Bride in a cage match), Tim Brooke-Taylor (who performs a hilarious Chartered Accountant Dance) and ditzy hostess Aimi MacDonald.

Much funnier than "DNAYS," "The 1948 Show" contains more of the surreal, random, yet erudite silliness that would make "Flying Circus" a classic.

In the famous "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch, well-heeled braggarts take turns one-upping each other with stories of their deprived childhoods. "Cardboard box? Ah, you were lucky," Feldman says. "We lived for three months in a rolled-up newspaper in a septic tank. ... " "Luxury," Chapman snorts.

Cleese hones his officious persona as an uptight news reader flustered when Feldman grabs the pages from his hand and runs around the studio with them, and as a zoo official who accuses an employee swallowed by a boa constrictor of loafing.

As an Arab who wanders into a live English TV soap, Feldman proves he didn't even have to open his mouth to get laughs, and it makes you wish he'd stuck with the group.

"Monty Python's Graham Chapman: Looks Like a Brown Trouser Job — The U.S. College Tours Live 1988" (Ryko, unrated). Not a classic series; did not lead to, precede or inspire Monty Python.

The year before Chapman died of throat cancer in 1989, he went on his last series of comedy lectures at colleges, where fans treated him like a rock star (his Michael-Jacksonesque red-and-blue shirt in this one doesn't hurt).

Chapman opens with one of the all-time best ice-breakers: He asks the crowd for 30 seconds of abuse. The title comes from his long monologue about participating in the terrifying stunts of a "Dangerous Sports Club."

Before one particularly suicidal event, another club member turned to him and casually remarked, "Looks like a bit of a brown trouser job this afternoon, Graham."

The video and audio quality of this DVD are so atrocious that they're like watching it after the 60 fluid ounces of gin Chapman says he'd been drinking each day up through "The Holy Grail." But it's essential viewing for Python fans, and because Chapman is a remarkably entertaining monologist.

He talks about the group's origins, working relationships and favorite sketches, as well as lunatic behavior with the late Who drummer Keith Moon, and his full frontal nudity in "Monty Python's Life of Brian" (1979).

The exposure didn't bother him because he was a (real-life) doctor, but a sizable portion of the crowd in the scene were Muslim women who ran away screaming. "I like to think it was their religion." Original episodes of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" are available from A&E Home Video.

Naughty bits

Podiatrist Trivia: The big stomping foot at the beginning of each episode of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" is Cupid's from a 16th-century painting by Agnolo Bronzino, "Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time."

They could have been Toads.

Earlier names the group seriously considered:

"Toad Elevating Moment"

"Owl-Stretching Time"

"It's ... "

"Arthur Megapode's Cheap Show"

"E.L. Moist's Flying Circus"

"Vaseline Parade"

"Bunn, Wackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot"

"Baron Von Took's Flying Circus"

"A Horse, a Spoon and a Basin"

Where are they now?

Graham Chapman: An ex-Python. Deceased. Absolutely not pinin' for the fjords. From cancer in 1989. Surviving Pythons brought his urn to a 30-year retrospective in 1998 ("Monty Python's Flying Circus: Live at Aspen" A&E Home Video), and proceeded to knock it over.

John Cleese, 65: A total sell-out. Replaced Desmond Llewelyn as "Q" in the James Bond movies, and lends his voice to any cartoon or video game whose makers wave a wad of bills at him. Cleese's Food Network documentary, "Wine for the Confused," hits DVD August 9 (Koch Vision, unrated).

Idle, from the Python autobiography: "He once told me, and he won't deny this, 'I'll do anything for money,' so I offered him a pound to shut up and he took it." (It should be noted that Idle recently published "The Greedy Bastard Diary: A Comic Tour of America.")

John Cleese's Food Network documentary, "Wine for the Confused," hits DVD August 9 (Koch Vision, unrated).

Terry Gilliam, 64: Former animator and director of such hits as "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," "Brazil" and "The Fisher King," Gilliam has stumbled recently. See "Lost in La Mancha" (New Video, 2002, R) for his disastrous failed attempt to make "Don Quixote." His "Brothers Grimm," starring Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, hits theaters Aug. 26, unless all known prints of it disintegrate first.

Michael Palin, 62: Does mildly amusing travelogues that air on American PBS and cable stations. His three-disc "Himalya," currently airing on the Travel Channel, comes out July 19 from BBC/Warner.

Terry Jones, 63: The co-director of "Holy Grail" with Gilliam and the director of "Life of Brian" and "The Meaning of Life." Now apparently the least busy of the Pythons, he's done some Brit TV and has increasingly gotten to look like an old woman.

Eric Idle, 62: After such later-career duds as writer Eszterhas' "An Alan Smithee Film" (1997) and the 1989 American sitcom "Nearly Departed," he cannibalized old Python material and cleaned house at the Tonys.

Top 10 Monty Python quotes:

1. "It's ... "

2. "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

3. "It's just wafer-thin."

4. "This is an ex-parrot!"

5. "And now for something completely different."

6. "I cut down trees, I skip and jump, I like to press wild flow'rs ... I put on women's clothing and hang around in bars."

7. "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam! Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam! Lovely Spam, wonderful Spam!"

8. "It's just a flesh wound."

Mark Rahner: 206-464-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com