This ‘very naughty boy’ was a Python like no other
Terry Jones was at the core of British comedy group’s transgressive aesthetic
The Pythons — the living ones, anyway — can be funny about death.
The point of this column is to say surrealists such as these guys should be funny about death. Some of us could use the help.
“Two down, four to go,” tweeted John Cleese on Wednesday, reacting with affection to the death of Terry Jones, maybe the least Pythonesque of the Monty Python comedy team. Or maybe the most.
Cleese’s kicker, referencing the death of Graham Chapman way back in 1989, was consistent with a man who has in his Twitter profile, “Yes, I am still alive, contrary to rumor.”
“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 op ed articles. He wrote about Geoffrey Chaucer. He came up with all manner of TV shows, from fictions to documentaries.
Michael Palin was correct Wednesday when on his Facebook page he called Jones 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 like Mary Whitehouse only resulted in more publicity. Still, numerous local authorities in Britain outright banned the film.
I remember vividly walking past picketing nuns when I defied my parents and went into the cinema to see the film — which was strikingly sweet and generous in tone, not unlike
Jones himself.
In “Life of Brian,” Jones was satirizing religion and poking fun at the irrationality of many of his beliefs and assumptions, but he and the other Pythons were also using the core story as a way to satirize a whole bunch of other things, from trade unions to armchair progressives.
Most of that went over my head in 1979, but I quickly figured out that this was a crack in British religious orthodoxy, that the Pythons were pushing the boulders as far as they could be pushed and it behooved 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 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 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 all-male comedy troop 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 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, like Jones, it becomes harder to plan your own death. Your own narrative has changed and old stories and legacies are in process of slipping away.
But I hope Cleese, Idle and the rest of them go out kicking and grinning — after about 50 more years, of course.
David Bowie, their contemporary, 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.