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Looking for some quality comedy entertainment to check out?
Who better to turn to for under-the-radar comedy recommendations than comedians?
Youd be hard-pressed to find someone working in comedy that hasnt creatively cribbed fromMonty Python.
I mean, theDead Parrot sketchis just straight-up foundational.
But beneath Pythons Dadaist deconstruction of comedy trends (sideways credits FTW!)
was a mean anti-authority streak.
PictureA Prairie Home Companionon acid, orTim and Ericdistilled into audio form.
We were listening to it because it was a radio show.
It was a radio show in the 50s calledThe Goon Show.
It was a pure radio show and we all were listening to it.
Kids were devoted to it in England.
It also had Peter Sellers in it, who of course is the greatest voice man of all time.
If he could listen to you for five minutes, he could do a perfect impersonation of you.
He had this wonderful program he created which allowed him to experiment with his insanely funny characters.
We used to listen to that in the same way that people listen to Monty Python.
We were obsessed with it.
What was it aboutThe Goon Showthat you gravitated toward?It was absurdist.
It didnt give a shot to be intellectual, yet it at its core it still was.
I always had an affinity for the silly, and the humor ofThe Goon Showwas just that.
It was also very subversive.
And that anti-authority really spoke to us [in Python].
Other people who come across us can give us labels if they want.
Was that your first introduction to Peter Sellers?Oh yes, that was where he started.
Then he made some very good English comedies, and then he made one or two extraordinary ones likeDr.
Youd be impressed to know that I used to write film scripts for him with Graham Chapman.
We all wrote together.
Only one of them was done and it was … pretty terrible.
It was calledThe Magic Christian.
I worked with him and I very much liked him.
What were your feelings towards American humor at the time?
I especially loved the big musical-comedy films every summer with Danny Kaye.
So I was very aware of and in tune with American humor.
You couldnt label it.
You couldnt label it because they were all so different.
It was far more intelligent and much more lively than anything we had going on in England.
Ive written a couple of books on depression and on psychology.
I lecture on creativity.
Im a phony professor at Cornell.
I go and talk to them about things that interest me.
I remember how enormously exciting it was to first discover Buster Keaton or W.C. Fields or the Marx Brothers.
I really thought he was wonderful.
I think he is harder style, much harder than mine, but very strikingly his own.
I read on the press release that you only want absurd questions during the Q&A.
Care to elaborate?To express it another way, I would like disrespectful questions.
I like rude questions, like Why cant you stay married?
or Why is [Michael] Palin so much funnier than you are?
It doesnt have to be respectful.
In fact, my daughter will be the questioner.
You see, the problem with most interviewers is theyre much too respectful.
My favorite film of ours isLife of Brian.
I do think it is a better film.
I think its a much better story and its also about something important.
Its a more interesting subject.
But the fact is and Im very grateful for this Americans seem to loveHoly Grail.
But sometimes people just want to ask about the other things that Ive done in my career.
These conversations get really interesting.
The only way youre ever going to develop your style is by being in front of an audience.
I suppose if youre just a writer, then thats different.
Somebody might write you something, but suppose if they dont?
attempt to write something yourself.
Have a go at it yourself.
Its not easy to write original comedy.
You just have to work it out and fine tune it in front of an audience.
You mustnt be frightened of failure.
So you mustnt be too frightened of failure.
Its embarrassing when you tell a joke and people dont laugh.
You just have to learn to deal with that.
Move on quickly to the next joke.
Heres a fun thing: Theres an exercise that people can do which I think is very valuable.
Take a scene that you love thats been done by one or two people that you also particularly love.
Watch it again and again and again until youre no longer amused by it.
Watch it so many times that you dont actually laugh at it.
When you start laughing at it again, thats the moment when you start typing out how its done.
