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I'm sick of this 'being diplomatic' cobblers when someone asks me to guess their age. People only say that because they think they look younger than they really are. So I always say the age that I think they are, and I'm usually pretty close, which pisses them off. Ha Ha!!!!!!!!!!!
I'd never heard that about Presley being a MP fan. I knew John Lennon liked them. And George Harrison. But Elvis? I must say, I'm pleasantly surprised.
The story goes that Elvis was mental for The Holy Grail and knew dozens of lines from the movie. His favourite scene was The Black Knight and he would watch it over and over and quote it regularly - "It's just a flesh wound. Come back here and I'll bite your legs off." Just like we used to.
Wow that's neat. It would seem that Kaufman was not the first full-blown Elvis impersonator, but I wonder if he was the first one seen by the wider public when he did his amazing Tonight Show performance.
Could be. I remember that a few months before Elvis died, Chuck Barris said that there were so many Elvis impersonators that he should do an all "Elvis" Gong Show.
blohmymind Had it not been for his awful manager, Elvis would’ve done so many talk shows. He wanted to be on Johnny Carson but his dickhead manager declined every fucking booking request he got. Dick Cavett was also interested. He almost went on that Glen Campbell Variety Show before his manager declined.
@@GeorgiaOverdrive yeah, wtf was the deal with Parker?! A real controlling asshole. He didn't let Elvis do better films, with more challenging scripts, like Elvis desired. He should've sent Parker to that bridge, from Holy Grail, where he is asked his favorite color!
Greatest feature of his personality: he doesn't take himself seriously at all, everything he and the MP lads did for comedy will always be my choice of entertainment...I just love the absolute insanity/ silliness and that hasn't changed with age!
As an American I am offended by the use of the word "minor" when placing The Pythons in the rank of deities. I think I can speak for many of us when I say; O Pythons! Ooh, you are so big! So absolutely huge. Gosh, we're all really impressed down here, I can tell you.
Cleese may have a point, in that Month Python certainly overshadows all other British comedy in the US. I love Python. But I've also enjoyed Benny Hill, whose show was syndicated on TV here for many years. John has said, "Benny is from a different planet!"
Actually even by their standards Monty Python is still a fringe thing in the US. But as they say, they have a 'cult like' audience who 'likes it a lot'. The real genius of britain was Spike Milligan, but of course thats because he was insane. Benny Hill is simply not discussed because his show was SO sexist. Its got nothing to do with feminists or anything, the fact is that once shows are off the air they are typically done. Benny Hill, like Spike Milligan, are in a class of their own, for one thing, nobody can even understand what Benny Hill is saying or singing, so its not like it would still be discussed anyway. There are british shows from five years ago that are largely forgotten. But had the pythons not done movies they would largely be a footnote, and if they had come out a year earlier they'd of been in black and white like 'do not adjust your set', which is also pretty funny.
@@girlsdrinkfeck It should be "taken" his place. Considering your English language skills, it's not surprising your taste in comedy is at the level of Gervais.
2:56 John Lennon said this in his last radio interview (which he gave to the BBC) in 1980 (just a couple of days before he was murdered). It can be found here on youtube. And (as any Python fan knows) George Harrison was a big fan, too: He co-produced BRIAN, starred in THE RUTLES, etc.
Kai Thomas In actual fact, the interview was conducted on the very day Lennon was killed. Andy Peebles interviewed him in New York and then landed in Heathrow to the terrible news.
Yes, as both a Python and Lennon/Beatles fan, I was aware of this. I wonder why John didn't participate in The Rutles, like George. He'd have done it and been great. He was still alive and living in NYC, where some of it was filmed. Oh well, at least he got to see it and it's reported, he adored it. Ron Nasty lives on! 😎
Harrison clearly had a great sense of humour :) The fact his analogue in the Rutles is played by an Indian actor, and barely says a single line throughout the entire film, is very funny; he clearly had a great deal of humility to laugh along with it rather than being offended.
He's not wrong, I'm an American and love Python, but I must admit that a lot of their sketches weren't very good, many were good and some are the funniest things ever created.
Yes, it was back in the early '70s and us Texas boys would smoke a lot of weed before watching Python and it was hilarious. Years later, watching it straight, it was "I don't get it. Why did I ever think it was funny?"
Even the pythons admit that, Palin and jones have said that Cleese and Chapman, which was mostly Cleese, did the 'feature' skits and they mostly did the stuff that muddled around it. Cleese really was the star writer, you can see that in the skits that really work. However, the 'bycycle tour' show to me was a classic that foreshadowed their movies. But certainly without their movies I think they would be a footnote. As many have said, a lot of people watched just to see the cartoons, a lot watched to see breasts, and lots watched just to see grown men acting silly. Oh shit, this was two years ago. Welcome to the future!
@@mikearchibald744 One nice thing about being here in the future, is that the old Monty Python movies still exist! And, yes, that 'bicycle tour' show was one of their very best!
@@TheRamsberg If you haven't seen the interview with John Cleese and Eric Idle on australian TV, just do a search on youtube for it, it shows just how funny they still are. And if you havent see 'the meaning of python' where they just sit around chatting, they simply narrate a couple of sketches that didn't make it that were pretty hilarious. Glad you made it to the future.
I think Python is overrated in the US. But only in as much that we Americans tend to think of Python as flawless comedy with one zinger right after another. And frankly, having watched some of the Flying Circus, that wasn't the case. Python was quite capable of missing the mark on the comedy pretty broadly. kind of the result of being somewhat experimental and freeform as I hear the Python creative process was.
The American comedy movies I saw as a kid seemed to have always been of the "let's do as many jokes as we can in a minute, surely one of them will get a laugh" variety. Whereas the most I've seen of British stuff is quality over quantity. I wonder if that has something to do with it. If, indeed that generalisation holds. Monty Python leans more towards the rapid fire jokes than Fawlty Towers for instance. Constantly being silly, versus also having to put a storyline in there. Several in fact.
This would be terrible, to be honest. Whilst yes, both were very silly, their styles were completely different. What made MP great, was the utter randomness of every sketch, yet it all seem to fit in together so perfectly. Mel Brookes, on the other hand, loved to tell a story, and would progress in the silliness as the film went on. Blazing saddles and Young Frankenstein are good examples of this.
It is because the US is more about sitcoms. Being Canadian we do sketch comedy too. We also grew up with other British sketch comedy too, the 2 Ronnies, Dave Allen and so on. So if Americans don't watch PBS they miss sketch comedy from other nations so when they see Monty Python it is new and unique to them. The US has Saturday night live but that is so poorly written.
SNL wasn't poorly written when it started. It was created by Lorne Michaels, a Canadian, and one of the best performers of the first few years was Dan Ayckroyd, another Canadian. The Americans also hd In Living Color, and Dave Chapelle.
I liked Living colour and Dave Chapelle. Jim Carey was great in living colour. But I think both series were not really main stream like American sitcoms were, like Seinfeld.
His comment reminds me of a T-shirt a mate had made for me. It's a simple graph with *"Age"* on the horizontal axis and *"Care Factor"* on the vertical and the line starts low goes up and peaks at about 20 years and slowly declines in an asymptotic approach to zero as you get really old. I'm near zero now. The original idea was to have the vertical axis say *"Give a Shit"*. 8^)
Sure, the idea isn't mine, I saw it somewhere. I got a red felt tip and put an "X" just around the point where it hits the X axis to point out how many shits I give. 8^)
I absolutely agree. They go nuts about it over there as if it’s something spectacularly special and different, and how it makes them oh so quirky to like. I’ve seen some people over there almost build up a personality on liking it. I mean it was very good (some/most of it) but in terms of British comedy, it wasn’t THAT good.
Wandile Mtambo not be no funny mate, but we are literally on the video in which the title is a key cast member saying that the show is overrated in America (that last part being important). My only point was, the Yanks just go a little overboard with it
I agree. I feel that most Americans over thinks Monty Python. Yes it was funny, but so was Fawlty Towers, fry and Laurie, Blackadder and many others. I mean Rowan Atkinson does the same thing but mostly alone. British humour haven’t changed much, it’s slightly more vulgar now I think, but it’s not pretentious like so many of America’s current batch of comedians.
MPFC cannot be overrated at all. This has been my Engish Lesson for years. And for a german its been a lesson in humor too. And by the way. One of my biggest lost opportunities in my life was when I didnt address Mr. Cleese when I saw him in Winchester visiting the wonderful cathedral in the late nineties.
I believe Monty Python was first broadcast in the US out of Dallas, TX channel 13 in about 1971. I watched it as an 11 year old kid. Great fun, and in B+W, too.
Was introduced to Monty Python on PBS as a 9 or 10 year old in 1973 or 1974. Was one of their 1st big fans here in the States. My friend and I absolutely loved them at that tender age............still do.
Charlene Spiteri and John Cleese on the same couch together .... interesting. Spiteri worked with Rammstein on a single song - is this the closest thing to an intereaction between Python and Rammstein ever?
Mr. Cleese, isn't kidding about Monty Python's status here in the states. I've never known a time in my life when Monty Python wasn't popular. Even back when I was child in the 90's Monty Python was well liked by me and my fellow students (pupils to you Redcoats). To this day I've only ever met a handful of people who have never heard of or didn't like Monty Python.
John Cleese did a funny Barbie doll sketch in 1965 for Help! magazine where he met Terry Gilliam which was founded by MAD magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman which was in a way the kind of the start of Python.
I think it's because Fawlty Towers is just a sitcom. It's a very funny sitcom, but it's just a sitcom. Monty Python's Flying Circus was not only a very different format, it was also first broadcast on American TV shortly before the release of Holy Grail. So, there was a movie component to bring in even more followers.
Interesting, I guess I assumed that Python had the same vaunted stature in the UK that it does in the U.S. In the U.S. I’d say it’s a medium SIZED fan base, but an incredibly rabid one: Americans who are into Python are WAY into Python. So many American comics cite it as a major influence. I’m 50, and I grew up around a lot of people who were completely Gaga for it. I think I unconsciously presumed that if it had these kinds of fans in the U.S. it must be pervasively adored in the U.K. I always thought it was amusing but never caught the bug for it that so many of my friends did. I chuckled when I watched it but never felt the need to memorize the bits and quote them, etc.
2:54 "things that made me most proud.." Why not "proudest"? I've caught this many times in various interviews with different people so it's not just a slip, and it is just not according to any grammar rules. I also just recently learned "prone" cannot be "proner" but "more prone". This is a feature of language that should be addressed in grammars. Sorry, foreigner poking in here, I'll show myself out
John Cleese I don't really how old of you you really should have said 75 instantly when he ask his age he would like it. I have something to say to you John Cleese.
I think Family Guy did a cutaway gag about watching Python's flying circus, the sketches that no one remembers because they weren't funny. Those exist too, but man. If the price of those being made is all the good ones being made as well, bring em on.
I love that he said that if you leave LA or NY "in the middle of nowhere" as if that's all America is haha. Two big cities, and then just us hicks riding horses and bear hunting. But to be fair, most Americans know London, and..... London.
@@Domino13334 I know them because geography and travel are my thing. But most Americans knowing Manchester? No. More would know Liverpool because of the Beatles, but Manchester here would probably be primarily known for its football club, and the U.S. isn't exactly mad for football/soccer.
They never got to grips with open the s.........door and alot of it was censored. Well we could not understand Rowan and Martin's Laugh In so the feeling was mutual.
Didn't he move to America where he could be the biggest star as possible? I mean, he said he came to California for the sunshine. He must really be too big a star if he thinks that he should be less accolated for his efforts.
Yea watching Monty Python movies when your a 12 year old American is a transcendental experience really. That type of humor is foreign to us thats why we love it.
The only Monty Python film i ever seen, i think was called The Holy Grail. It was hilarious. the black knight part and the knights of ni. I'm an American. i guess we laugh easy. I never liked Benny Hill though.
Life of Brian is just as good (I consider it better actually but Holy Grail is considered to be their best by most). Meaning of Life is a bit more uneven but it's worth seeing just for the Mr. Creosote scene.
Chuck Norris was born in a cabin built with his own two hands. Chuck Norris can put out a fire with a gallon of gasoline. Chuck Norris can set ants on fire with a magnifying glass. At night. Chuck Norris can hear sign language. When Chuck Norris was born he drove his mom home from the hospital.... Chuck Norris will never have a heart attack... even a heart isn't foolish enough to attack Chuck Norris. If he wanted to, Chuck Norris could rob a bank. By phone. Chuck Norris can build a snowman out of rain. Chuck Norris can strangle you with a cordless phone. Chuck Norris once bowled a perfect game with a marble. Chuck Norris can speak braille. Chuck Norris won the World Horseshoe Pitching Contest while they were still attached to a Clydesdale. Some kids piss their name in the snow. Chuck Norris can piss his name into concrete. Jesus can walk on water, but Chuck Norris can swim through dry land. Chuck Norris once shot an enemy plane down with his finger by yelling, "Bang!" The quickest way to a man's heart is with Chuck Norris' fist.... Chuck Norris can kill two stones with one bird. Chuck Norris is the only man to ever defeat a brick wall in a game of tennis. Chuck Norris can do a wheelie on a unicycle. Chuck Norris is the only person on the planet that can kick you in the back of the face. Chuck Norris once punched a man in the soul. When Chuck Norris enters a room, he doesn't turn the lights on, he turns the dark off. Chuck Norris doesn’t wear a watch, HE decides what time it is. Chuck Norris is the only person to ever win a staring contest against Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder at the same time. Chuck Norris can breathe in and out at the same time. Chuck Norris doesn't wear condoms because their is no protection against Chuck Norris.
Not sure who this goober host is, but if he actually thinks that washed up footballer is top three in Americans' minds when referencing Britain, he doesn't know jack shit about us in general. American's outside of a minuscule niche don't give a flying fuck about soccer or its stars. That's why he didn't accomplish anything really when he came over here. Beckham's not even top 20. Just so many the incredible British musicians, actors and comedians alone are well ahead of him; not to mention politicians/royalty.
John cleese an extraordinary man extremely funny and very careful with his career that's why I'm astonished to have seen his appearance in the film "rat race" - I can't believe he did it - other than that film he had a brilliant career
One of but not the best, MP has some sketches that were not so good and then really good ones, that’s why a lot of people put only fools and horses or fawlty towers at the top
Sonia Higgins Lead singer of a Scottish band called Texas. They're very popular in the world, but I'm guessing not in America, judging by the number of "who is she" comments. They were really big in the 90s.
Tony Arcieri Bill Burr, Louie Ck, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Steve Wright, Cheers, Taxi, Police Squad, MASH, The Simpsons, Spin City, Happy Days. Yeah, what a load of shit.
Not Everything British made it here and there was plenty of good comedy in the US when Python came around. Python was a phenomenon because it was so good and unique. I first heard Python on a 747 from Chicago to LA in 1973. I heard Argument Sketch. I was only 11 and my sister was 12 and we were laughing our asses off even though we could only understand 75% of what they were saying. The delivery, timing, cleverness, absurdity were extraordinary and general rule breaking was unique and refreshing. It literally jumped-out at you and captured your attention. During the 3 hr flight it played probably 3 times and we roared with laughter each time. Then in 1975, I found them on PBS and started buying their records. They simply appealed to my twisted, dry, absurd sense of humor I already had as a kid that had already been shaped by 60's and early 70's American acts. I was already a comedy fan and grew-up listening to Bill Cosby, George Carlin and National Lampoon Radio Hour- which was filled with future SNL cast members ( and read National Lampoon and Mad Magazine). I was a big fan of Rowen and Martin's Laugh-in and Smothers Brothers, too. Python was a perfect fit for America; they were exposed to the American public at the right time and made a great contribution to American comedy. They shone like a shaft of gold because they were truly and uniquely funny, not because all around was dark and not because their British accents made them a novelty. None of Pythons contemporaries, Cook, Adkinson, Benny Hill achieved such success, nor could they have. Benny Hill came the closest. He may have been even bigger had he wanted to do more work in the US- but he didn't want to.
@@mikewynne7131 Wilde: Her majesty is like a stream of bat's piss... Everyone:, no Oscar Wilde, how dare you! Wilde: which is to say, her majesty is like a golden shaft of light, where all else is enveloped in darkness. Everyone: Right, very good. Yes, oh yes, quite witty Wilde, very good... Something like that. It's only been about 30 some odd years, since I've heard it. Lol
