And now for something completely Python

The Monty Python crew was as wild and chaotic as the show would make it seem; it’s a miracle that the show ever pulled together and existed for any length of time. The (five of six) surviving members will have a reunion on October 15 at the Ziegfield Theatre in New York. [Link]

There was, to begin with, the Oxford-Cambridge split, with Mr. Jones, Mr. Palin and Mr. Gilliam (whom they made a sort of honorary Oxford man) on one side and Mr. Cleese, Mr. Chapman and Mr. Idle, all of whom belonged to the Cambridge Footlights troupe, on the other. And then there were the subgroups: Mr. Palin and Mr. Jones were a writing pair, as were Mr. Cleese and Mr. Chapman, even as Mr. Cleese (and everyone else) grew increasingly exasperated with Mr. Chapman’s unreliability. Somehow it escaped their notice that he had become a ruinous alcoholic who had to use a double in the rope-bridge sequence of “Holy Grail” because he was suffering from the shakes that day. And yet he was the natural leading man of the group, the only one who might have gone on to become a genuine movie actor. Mr. Cleese, who spoke affectingly of Mr. Chapman at his memorial service, says in the documentary: “Graham should have been sent back to the factory and fixed. He was not an efficient creature.”

Author: Jon Lebkowsky

Co-wrangler of Plutopia News Network, cohost Radio Free Plutopia. Podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. Former editor/publisher, FringeWare Review; associate editor at bOING bOING and Factsheet Five; writer at Mondo 2000, 21C, Wired, Whole Earth Review, Austin Chronicle; sub-editor at Millennium Whole Earth Catalog; blogger at Worldchanging. Digital culture maven, podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. On The WELL, Cohost of VC (virtual communities), Media, and Civil War (.ind) conferences.