‘Someone totally consumed with life’
Monty Python member
THE Pythons — the living ones, anyway — can be funny about death. Surrealists like these guys should be funny about death. Some of us could use the help.
‘‘Two down, four to go,’’ tweeted John Cleese, reacting with affection to the death on January 21 of 77yearold
Terry Jones, maybe the least Pythonesque of the Monty Python comedy team, maybe the most.
Cleese’s kicker, referring to the death of Graham Chapman in 1989, was consistent with a man who has in his Twitter profile: ‘‘Yes, I am still alive, contrary to rumour.’’
‘‘HE WAS A VERY NAUGHTY BOY!!’’ tweeted Terry Gilliam, ‘‘and we miss you. Terry [Jones] was someone totally consumed with life . . . a brilliant, constantly questioning, iconoclastic, righteously argumentative and angry but outrageously funny and generous and kind human being . . . and very often a complete pain in the ass. One could never hope for a better friend.’’
Eric Idle, a man usually known for looking on the bright side of life, said that Jones’ death, following a lifetime of making people laugh, was ‘‘too sad if you knew him’’. But if you didn’t? ‘‘You will always smile.’’
Idle’s emotion, expressed with his typical concision, clearly flowed from the diagnosis of dementia that Jones received in 2015. This had been, then, a slow goodbye, achingly familiar to any family, be it of blood or not, who has been afflicted with that horror. The Pythons were all about the quickness of their minds, and one of their number had been losing his. Especially cruel, given that of all the Pythons, Jones was the most iconoclastic. He never allowed himself to be trapped in one genre, any single perception. He could slip away.
Jones wrote children’s books. He penned oped articles. He wrote about Geoffrey Chaucer. He came up with all manner of television shows, from fictions to documentaries.
Michael Palin was correct when he called Jones on his Facebook page a
‘‘Renaissance comedian’’, by which I think he meant that Jones used comedy as a kind of creative entree, not just into different forms, but genres. Ideas, too. And activism.
Jones directed films, including, brilliantly, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a 1979 film about a guy who happened to be born on the same day as Jesus Christ and right next door.
If you weren’t around in 1979, it’s hard to imagine the indignation and outrage that greeted the release of the film, even if the campaigns of contemporaneous moralists such as Mary Whitehouse only resulted in more publicity. Still, numerous local authorities in Britain banned the film outright. I vividly remember walking past picketing nuns when I defied my parents and went into the cinema to see the film — which was, of course, strikingly sweet and generous in tone, not unlike Jones himself.
In Life of Brian, Jones was satirising religion and poking fun at the irrationality of many beliefs and assumptions, but he and the other Pythons were also using the core story as a way to satirise a whole bunch of other things, from trade unions to armchair progressives.
It was a crack at British religious orthodoxy. The Pythons were pushing the boulders as far as they could be pushed and it behoved any interested parties to jump with them into the hole. The Pythons had other perceived peaks but it was Life of Brian that put them at the top of the BBC News.
And that, primarily, was Jones’ doing. People were so busy being outraged they did not see the quality of the direction.
Jones, of course, had a famous fondness for appearing in drag, which included playing Brian’s mother, Mandy Cohen, in Life of Brian, hence the famous maternal line: ‘‘He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy.’’
In the 1960s, of course, Jones played a succession of female authority figures on the BBC’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus, many withering in their potency. He did so with a confidence atypical for the era, even in the world of the Pythons. And somehow when
Jones appeared in a sketch you didn’t so much think ‘‘funny’’ as’’ surrealistic’’.
Jones was the reason they were not just another allmale comedy troupe of upperclass Oxbridge graduates who had used their intellect for silliness. Jones was, even in the early days, partaking of a transgressive artistic movement, which is the reason why the Pythons, a strange and eclectic bunch, remain so beloved.
All the Pythons have to die, of course. We all do. But when a person has dementia, such as Jones, it becomes harder to plan your own death. Your own narrative has changed and old stories and legacies are in the process of slipping away. Quietness, blissfully, takes over.
David Bowie treated his exit as a spectacular piece of performance art. Once we eventually figured out what he was doing, it struck many of us as perhaps the greatest way to die, ever. Bowie was retiring a character and also leaving us himself.
Jones had a similarly broad range of guises. Just a different final exit, influence intact. — Chicago Tribune