Earlier this evening, I took part in a brief BBC Radio phone interview regarding the appeal of Monty Python in America. I’m not entirely sure why they decided to talk with me of all people — it was all fairly last-minute — but I assume they found my e-mail address through the Monty Python Society website. We are, after all, probably the oldest and most active club of our sort, and I think I’m in a pretty good position, therefore, to observe Python’s continued popularity here in the United States. I may, of course, be the only person who responded to them — nobody else has been beating down my door for an interview — but, at this point, that’s really neither here nor there. At 5:30 they called me up, and gave me a very brief idea of what to expect — this would be live, I’d be able to listen to the five or ten minutes leading into it, and the other guest that evening would be Martin Lewis, one of their reporters who’d worked with the Pythons as a producer on films like The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball. A little while after that, I was on the air.
Python’s continued appeal in America is, I think, a little baffling to many British. As the interviewer mentioned, there’s a general sense there that British humor just doesn’t cross the pond very well — that, as a whole, Americans just don’t get it. Yet, as both he and the person who contacted me this morning also mentioned, Holy Grail has apparently become “the US’s longest running cinema comedy”. Monty Python’s popularity has shown no signs of waning in the US, which is pretty remarkable for a British television show from the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Ultimately, I think you can trace this popularity back to one very simple fact: it’s extremely funny. And there isn’t a lot like Monty Python — certainly not in maninstream American comedy. The influence of Python on Saturday Night Live (the definitive American sketch comedy show) has been discussed often, but they’re really very different shows. As Lewis pointed out, many American comedians like Steve Martin will often cite Python as an influence, but, at the same, there’s really never been anything like Python before or since. Both its silliness and its uniquess have served it extremely well.
All in all, it was an interesting ten or fifteen minutes. I haven’t been able to find out yet whether the show will be archived online (and, to be honest, I never even caught the name of the program), but I’ll let you know when and if I do learn anything. And if there is anyone else out there who’d like to interview me, please feel free to let me know.
Update: The interview was with BBC Radio 5’s Up All Night and, apparently, wasn’t live after all. I was having trouble reconciling the five-hour time difference with the BBC program schedule online, so I suspected the conversation was being recorded for playback later. (Of course, up until the point they called me, I had no idea this was going to be an on-the-air interview at all.)
For the next twenty-four hours (give or take, but probably less) you can hear the interview on the Five Live website if you click to listen live and then select the 3-4 AM hour of Up All Night. It’s quite a ways in and difficult to find if you don’t know what you’re listening for, so I’ve uploaded an mp3 of the relevant discussion (2.99 MB). There was a bit more that didn’t make it to the air, including a brief discussion of the troupe members’ respective post-Python careers and how some very British references in Python still get laughs in America, even though we don’t have a clue what most of them mean. In particular, Lewis mentioned Reginald Maudling, the Tory Home Secretary who Americans have no reason to know outside the confines of the Flying Circus — but whose name, just from the sound of it, still gets a laugh.
In all, I think what made it to the air reflects the best elements of the interview (and chops off the later bits where I started to stammer and not know what to say). It’s short, more or less to the point, and both Lewis and I were given ample opportunity to speak. I was very happy to be a part of it.
