The phrase "And Now for Something Completely Different" originated with the British television personality Christopher Trace, who as presenter of the children's programme Blue Peter used it to link items on differing topics. It was taken up by other TV programmes and became a catchphrase on "Monty Python's Flying Circus", so much so that it was used as the title when the Pythons made their first film in 1971. Rather bizarrely, the film was produced by Victor Lownes, of Playboy fame, who saw it as the ideal way to introduce Americans to the mysteries of the Python cult.
Unlike the other three Python films ("Monty Python and the Holy Grail", "Monty Python's Life of Brian" and "The Meaning of Life"), this one does not contain any original material. It consists of sketches taken from the first two series of the TV show, linked by some of Terry Gilliam's surreal animation sequences. The sketches were not taken direct from the television version but were specially remade for the film; some of them were slightly rewritten. I remember getting into a heated debate with a school friend, now a distinguished Professor of History at Oxford, about whether the famous "Dead Parrot Sketch" contains the lines "It has rung down the curtain and joined the choir eternal"; it turned out that I had seen the film version, which does contains these lines, and he had seen the television one, which doesn't.
Although, as the "Not the Nine O'clock News" team once pointed out, Britain is still ostensibly a Python-worshipping country, Pythonesque humour is an acquired taste, and attempting to explain its appeal to anyone who is not a Python-worshipper is a forlorn hope. (I have tried, and failed miserably, with my wife). This is probably a generational thing; I belong to that generation which came of age in the seventies and which prided itself on its ability to repeat Python sketches verbatim, but even in that period there was a large part of the older generation which reacted to the show in much the same way as Graham Chapman's colonel. "This is getting silly. And a bit suspect, I think". As for anyone born since 1980, and many people born since 1970, I suspect that they may regard the show with the same bafflement that my generation reserved for old radio shows like ITMA. ("Did people really use to laugh at that?")
Even as a practising Pythonist I have to admit that not all the sketches in "And Now For Something Completely Different" are hilarious; "Musical Mice", for example, does not seem nearly so funny today as it probably once did, and some of the animation segments now look a bit dated. There is not much to link the various sketches together, so film does not flow in the same way as "The Holy Grail" or "Life of Brian", both of which consisted of a series of linked sketches which together formed a coherent narrative. Nevertheless, much of the material here is brilliantly funny.
My particular favourites include:-
Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook (In which John Cleese's Hungarian gentlemen is misled by an inaccurate phrasebook into repeating phrases like "Please will you fondle my buttocks" or "My hovercraft is full of eels" in the belief that he is asking something innocuous like "Where is the railway station?")
Hell's Grannies (A takeoff of the rather earnest tone of British television documentaries of the period).
The Funniest Joke in the World (Or how our boys won the war by telling lethally funny jokes to the Germans).
Dead Parrot (In which Cleese tries to persuade a sceptical Michael Palin that the parrot he has just purchased is dead, is a stiff, is no more, has ceased to be and has shuffled off this mortal coil. Perhaps the Pythons' best-known sketch).
Vocational Guidance Counsellor (Or the sketch which did for the accountancy profession what the Black Death did for mediaeval Europe)
Blackmail!
Upper Class Twit of the Year . When I first saw this, I assumed that the Upper Class Twits were purely fictitious; it was only when I was invited by my then girlfriend to accompany her to a meeting of the Kensington and Chelsea Young Conservatives that I realised that the Pythons' satire was, if anything, rather understated.
Like a number of other reviewers, I noticed that some of my favourite sketches (The Spanish Inquisition, The Australian Philosophers, Ministry of Silly Walks, etc.) were omitted from the film, although some of those that other reviewers were hoping to see, such as the exploding penguin, appeared in the third or fourth series of the programme and hence had not been written when this film was made. Nevertheless, I think that the Pythons were right to limit the amount of material and hence the length of the film to 90 minutes. The Monty Python format was originally designed for thirty-minute programmes, and would probably have become tedious if it had been dragged out to two hours or more. (This is what happens with "The Meaning of Life", which starts to drag towards the end). "And Now For Something Completely Different" is not the Pythons' greatest film- that must be "Life of Brian"- but it still contains plenty to laugh at. 8/10
Unlike the other three Python films ("Monty Python and the Holy Grail", "Monty Python's Life of Brian" and "The Meaning of Life"), this one does not contain any original material. It consists of sketches taken from the first two series of the TV show, linked by some of Terry Gilliam's surreal animation sequences. The sketches were not taken direct from the television version but were specially remade for the film; some of them were slightly rewritten. I remember getting into a heated debate with a school friend, now a distinguished Professor of History at Oxford, about whether the famous "Dead Parrot Sketch" contains the lines "It has rung down the curtain and joined the choir eternal"; it turned out that I had seen the film version, which does contains these lines, and he had seen the television one, which doesn't.
Although, as the "Not the Nine O'clock News" team once pointed out, Britain is still ostensibly a Python-worshipping country, Pythonesque humour is an acquired taste, and attempting to explain its appeal to anyone who is not a Python-worshipper is a forlorn hope. (I have tried, and failed miserably, with my wife). This is probably a generational thing; I belong to that generation which came of age in the seventies and which prided itself on its ability to repeat Python sketches verbatim, but even in that period there was a large part of the older generation which reacted to the show in much the same way as Graham Chapman's colonel. "This is getting silly. And a bit suspect, I think". As for anyone born since 1980, and many people born since 1970, I suspect that they may regard the show with the same bafflement that my generation reserved for old radio shows like ITMA. ("Did people really use to laugh at that?")
Even as a practising Pythonist I have to admit that not all the sketches in "And Now For Something Completely Different" are hilarious; "Musical Mice", for example, does not seem nearly so funny today as it probably once did, and some of the animation segments now look a bit dated. There is not much to link the various sketches together, so film does not flow in the same way as "The Holy Grail" or "Life of Brian", both of which consisted of a series of linked sketches which together formed a coherent narrative. Nevertheless, much of the material here is brilliantly funny.
My particular favourites include:-
Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook (In which John Cleese's Hungarian gentlemen is misled by an inaccurate phrasebook into repeating phrases like "Please will you fondle my buttocks" or "My hovercraft is full of eels" in the belief that he is asking something innocuous like "Where is the railway station?")
Hell's Grannies (A takeoff of the rather earnest tone of British television documentaries of the period).
The Funniest Joke in the World (Or how our boys won the war by telling lethally funny jokes to the Germans).
Dead Parrot (In which Cleese tries to persuade a sceptical Michael Palin that the parrot he has just purchased is dead, is a stiff, is no more, has ceased to be and has shuffled off this mortal coil. Perhaps the Pythons' best-known sketch).
Vocational Guidance Counsellor (Or the sketch which did for the accountancy profession what the Black Death did for mediaeval Europe)
Blackmail!
Upper Class Twit of the Year . When I first saw this, I assumed that the Upper Class Twits were purely fictitious; it was only when I was invited by my then girlfriend to accompany her to a meeting of the Kensington and Chelsea Young Conservatives that I realised that the Pythons' satire was, if anything, rather understated.
Like a number of other reviewers, I noticed that some of my favourite sketches (The Spanish Inquisition, The Australian Philosophers, Ministry of Silly Walks, etc.) were omitted from the film, although some of those that other reviewers were hoping to see, such as the exploding penguin, appeared in the third or fourth series of the programme and hence had not been written when this film was made. Nevertheless, I think that the Pythons were right to limit the amount of material and hence the length of the film to 90 minutes. The Monty Python format was originally designed for thirty-minute programmes, and would probably have become tedious if it had been dragged out to two hours or more. (This is what happens with "The Meaning of Life", which starts to drag towards the end). "And Now For Something Completely Different" is not the Pythons' greatest film- that must be "Life of Brian"- but it still contains plenty to laugh at. 8/10