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The original version of Quintessential Comedy featured the first in a series of articles and essays about comedy. Kicking it off was a piece on Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which finally (!) I’ve reproduced here…

Dipping back to the past, remembering the things we saw and did is almost always done through rose-tinted glasses. The same is certainly true of comedy. Looking back at popular sitcoms of the day such as Please Sir! or Man About the House leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, and while Love Thy Neighbour might be a true depiction of the age, it’s modern revisionism to claim that it was cleverer than anyone ever knew at the time.

The Pythons were never concerned with skin colour in their comedy – the laughs came from the differences between cultures. The French, the Germans, the Australians – all were used, atypical comedy caricatures created under each flag and then used for maximum comedy effect. We can look at the use of the French in particular in the Flying Sheep sketch as well as “The Holy Grail” – in both their language is the key to the humour, rather than the situation (both of which incidentally, feature flying animals).

There is a level of sophistication in the work of Monty Python that is rarely touched by others. Creating a definitive list of the comedy giants of modern history nigh is on impossible, and even a top 50 comedy characters list by UK television station Channel 4 failed to dig with any real purpose into the subject, awarding the Pythons a criminally cursory entry:

“The Pepperpots - Monty Python in drag

Ever-present screeching harpies in the style of demented Mary Whitehouse, who cropped up wherever a sketch needed a middle aged woman of dubious intellect and violent intent.”

Arguing that the compilers of the list should be ashamed of themselves is beside the point; noting that it is a list of characters, not jokes, is the point.

We rarely recall the jokes of great comedy because there are very few actual jokes. It is the characters that stick in our mind, the most successful of these being of a small number of derivations: there are the archetypes, such as the Vicar of Dibley’s Geraldine Granger, everyone’s idea of a female Anglican minister; there are the stand-up personas, of which Tommy Cooper is a prime example – he wasn’t a bumbling magician in real life, but instead was skilled at the illusions to such an extent that he could ruin them and still come out on top; and there are the presenter/host/MC characters that are 95% real with a smattering of acting and a lot of gags.

What we see here is that there are less jokes used in character comedy than in stand-up comedy, and less jokes used in stand-up than in presenting (we’re poking sticks at Jonathan Ross, Chris Evans, and the master of such shows, David Letterman here).

If we define a joke as an abstract single or series of statements phrased, timed and intoned to evoke laughter, then we have a framework for your typical “Doctor! Doctor!” joke.

However defining the joke as a series of actions, whether movement, speaking, listening, eating or seeing yet similarly phrased, timed and intoned to induce laughter in the audience changes things around, and gives us a figurative situation, one in which a comedy character can live and breathe, and climb out of the restrictions of the television set an into a national consciousness.

As far as television is concerned, Monty Python’s Flying Circus covered new ground in every episode of its run. Character comedy had been taken as far as it could be taken on radio thanks to the Goon Show and Round the Horne, and of course live comedy was a shadow of its former self, with regional club acts and the summer seasons providing the only real source for anyone wishing to have a jolly good laugh.

So the Pythons took a blend of character comedy, the almost dead sketch format (brought back to life with a zing by simply not ending any of them “naturally”) and countless typically absurd situations and gave birth to a series of zeitgeist-marrying characters and concepts that have been unrivalled both before and since.

Certainly in the UK, other teams of writers and performers have given the sketch show format their own spin, notably Reeves and Mortimer and Little Britain, although from the modern era of comedy it is probably The Fast Show that comes closest to the standards set by the Pythons of memorable characters, catchphrases, situations and imagery. Thankfully music is something from which most modern comedy acts have shied (unless done – they claim – ironically) and it’s difficult to see how anyone else could write and perform a number like “Medical Love Song”.

In launching Quintessential Comedy with a series of Monty Python-themed articles, we’ve probably started at the very top. We’ve established the superiority of the Python movies; that if there were no Monty Python, the funniest entry into western culture would have been a different shape but very, very similar; and that the Pythons did indeed reinvent comedy and their shadow is still felt today, almost FORTY YEARS LATER.

The Pythons may not be the greatest in the history of mankind – including what is yet to be written – but they are without a doubt, at this moment in time, The Greatest Comedy Act Yet, and (despite a token American drawing pretty pictures) Quintessentially British.

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