In music, I generally lean towards America, but as far as (TV) comedy goes, I'm a huge anglophile. The Young Ones, I'm Alan Partridge, Blackadder, to name a few, they all are brilliant series. But of course, each one of them was directly or indirectly influenced by Monty Python, 'The Beatles of British comedy', whose ground-breaking sketch show Monty Python’s Flying Circus started just over 50 years ago, in the fall of 1969. So, I’d like to do a mini-tribute to Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam.
It is important to notice that, as the Pythons have acknowledged themselves, it is not like they just came from nowhere. Two of their most important influences were arguably Spike Milligan (and the Goons) and Peter Cook (often paired with Dudley Moore), the former especially for the surrealism and 'verbal wackiness', and the latter for the anti-establishment/authority attitude and satire. Unfortunately, much of their television work (like Q5 and Not Only… But Also, respectively) was wiped out, and probably for this reason too these two forerunners are not quite as famous as they might have been. Another crucial thing for Pythons' success is that the Flying Circus was done in color (one of the first comedy series at that, I believe), so it doesn’t look so dated visually as many other earlier sketch shows.
All of the Pythons had already known each other before they came together. John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle had met at Cambridge and had worked together in the university's comedy troupe, known as the Footlights, whereas Terry Jones and Michael Palin had met at Oxford and had worked together on some revues there. A few years later, all of them were writers/performers on the show called the Frost Report, hosted by and starring David Frost. Terry Gilliam, the only American of the group, had known and worked with John Cleese in the mid-1960s and then later joined as an animator for a TV show called Do Not Adjust Your Set, which was written and performed by Idle, Jones and Palin (starring also David Jones and Denise Coffey).
So, the dynamics in Monty Python were basically already there as the group started. Cleese and Chapman, as well as Jones and Palin used to write in pairs for the TV show and the movies and worked together on the sketches before they even showed them for the others. If I had to generalize a bit, Cleese & Chapman would write more verbal sketches, often including some kind of argument and sometimes an excessive use of synonyms (the Parrot and Cheese Shop skits being prime examples of that). Palin & Jones had usually more visual elements and some crazy – historical or other – concept in the jokes (e.g. the Spanish Inquisition and the Barber Shop/Lumberjack Song sketches are theirs). Idle usually wrote alone, and his style was also more verbal, the Nudge Nudge skit probably the most famous example. In my opinion, Idle was also the funniest and in some ways the most versatile performer of them all. Gilliam's role in the TV show was mostly to provide the animation that would link the sketches together. He – along with Idle – was also an important sounding board when the skits, bulk of them written by Cleese & Chapman and Palin & Jones, were presented to the group for the first time. Of the members, John Cleese and Terry Jones were usually seen as the opposites as far as tastes in comedy are concerned, so the rest of the group would then often decide between their ideas.
There are far too many classic Monty Python sketches and movie scenes to list here, but here are a couple of longer ones with narratives which probably all of them worked on. Unfortunately, some of my favorites like Archaeology Today and the Poet McTeagle don’t seem to be fully available on YouTube, so these two will have to do:
The Funniest Joke in the World (that's the name, he he):
Hell’s Grannies (this version is from the movie And Now for Something Completely Different)