Monty Python founder Jones dead at 77
Terry Jones, who earned a spot in comedic lore as a member of British troupe Monty Python and had success as a director, screenwriter and author, died Tuesday at his home in the Highgate neighborhood of north London. He was 77.
His ex-wife, Alison Telfer, confirmed the death. Jones announced in 2016 that he had primary progressive aphasia, a neurological disease that impairs the ability to communicate.
Jones, four other Britons — Michael Palin, Eric Idle, John Cleese and Graham Chapman — and an American, Terry Gilliam, formed Monty Python in 1969. Their television sketch show, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” became a phenomenon, first in Great Britain and then in the United States when it was rebroadcast there in the mid-1970s.
The show worked a surreal brand of humor that was markedly different from most television fare. It led to “And Now for Something Completely Different,” a 1971 movie that was essentially a collection of skits from the TV show, and several other films.
Jones and Gilliam jointly directed “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975), and teamed up again on “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life” (1983). Jones was the sole director of “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (1979), the most successful financially. He also directed his own projects.
And he was an author, both of scholarly fare such as “Chaucer’s Knight” (1980), an alternative view of a character from “The Canterbury Tales,” and of books for children. The Boston Globe once called him “a warped Renaissance man.”
He was a Renaissance man of sorts on “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” as well. The many characters he played included an organist who tended not to wear clothes, a fellow known as the Amazing Mystico who could build buildings by hypnosis, and an assortment of middle-age women.
“Cross-dressing seems to be a long-standing Python tradition,” Filip Vukcevic wrote on media site IGN in 2018, “but when Jones does it, his butch bulk makes him the most terrifying shemale in all the land.”
The popularity of the show soon made “pythonesque” an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.
“The one thing we all agreed on, our chief aim, was to be totally unpredictable and never to repeat ourselves,” Jones deadpanned to The New York Times in 2009, when the group had a rare reunion at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York. “We wanted to be unquantifiable. That ‘pythonesque’ is now an adjective in the OED means we failed utterly.”
Terence Graham Parry Jones was born in Colwyn Bay, North Wales, on Feb. 1, 1942, “right bang slap in the middle of World War II,” as he put it in “The Pythons Autobiography,” a 2003 book by the troupe with Bob McCabe. His father, Alick, was a banker by profession but was in the Royal Air Force at the time and stationed in Scotland.
“I suppose they must have been guarding the grouse,” he wrote, “although he used to say later that they were testing out this newfangled stuff called RADAR. He came and saw me when I was a week old and was immediately posted to India. I would be 4 before he saw me again.”
When he was 5, the family moved to Claygate, in the London suburbs. A favorite among the radio offerings he listened to was “The Goon Show,” a comedy program that often veered into offbeat territory and had a cast that included Peter Sellers.
He was accepted at Oxford and agreed to attend. He almost changed his mind when Cambridge, which had put him on a waiting list, also accepted him, but he stuck with Oxford despite being intrigued by Cambridge’s poetry program. That was a good decision, he later reckoned; otherwise “I wouldn’t have met either Mike Palin or Geoffrey Chaucer — and without those two meetings the rest of my life would have been quite different.”
He joined the university’s Experimental Theater Club, known as ETC, spurning the more organized Oxford University Drama Society. He was also a decent scholar, something that he tapped later, but in “The Pythons” he recalled a moment in the library when, parsing some literary criticism, he realized that comedy and performing would take precedence.
“I suddenly thought, ‘Why am I getting so emotionally outraged by what someone else has written about what someone else has written about what someone else originally wrote?’ ” he recalled. “‘I’d rather do the original writing.’ ”
In 1963, he performed in and helped write his first revue, “Loitering With Intent” (“because it was done in a tent,” he explained). Palin, a fellow Oxford student, contributed material to that show. Both also worked on “Hang Down Your Head and Die,” an ETC show about capital punishment that, after its premiere at the university in 1963, went on to a sixweek run at the Comedy Theater in the West End in 1964.
The two also contributed to the 1964 edition of a show called “The Oxford Revue,” which was noticed by David Frost, who soon offered Jones and Palin jobs writing for “The Frost Report,” a television sketch show that had its premiere in 1966 on the BBC. Chapman and Idle were also on the writing staff, and Cleese was in the cast.
The next year Jones, Idle and Palin collaborated again on “Do Not Adjust Your Set,” a children’s TV show full of comedic sketches that foreshadowed the Python style. Gilliam eventually contributed some animation.
Although that show was aimed at children, it had a number of adult fans, including Cleese and Chapman.
“It was our treat on a Thursday afternoon,” Cleese said in “The Pythons.” “We would finish early and watch that because it was the funniest thing on television. I said to Graham, ‘Why don’t we ring the guys and see if they want to do a show with us?’ ”
And that, in 1969, was how “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” came about.
The name, though, was almost “Owl Stretching Time” or “A Horse, a Spoon and a Basin.” Those were among numerous names bandied about for weeks, until time ran out, and the troupe and the BBC, which was to broadcast the show, had to agree on something and finally did.
“I went back home and told my brother: We’ve got a title for the show, we’re going to call it ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus,’ ” Jones later recalled. “And he said, ‘It’ll never catch on.’ ”