And now for something completely different

It's a cruel world. Let's not go there

Let’s get this out of the way from the jump – there was another horrible shooting in the U.S. last week. In fact, there were many horrible shootings, as there are most weeks. But one of them has gotten nonstop attention because the victim was a close friend of our president (meaning his flattery and political organizing skills were useful to him). Since the assassination of this young, high-profile individual whose name need not be repeated here, nearly every publisher, broadcaster and newsmaker has bent over backwards to exalt him, overlooking the consistently abhorrent views he promoted so well. It’s gotten to the point that I might have to fire myself from this Substack for insubordination.

So I’m gonna try to ignore that story, and I assume you’re okay with that.

I was lucky Thursday night to have already planned a night of fun and frivolity seeing John Cleese introduce the classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail at the Thousand Oaks Performing Arts Center and then answer questions late into the evening about the making of the film and his life as a Python. Cleese had just begun a nationwide tour performing some 30 shows from Mesa to Albany in seven weeks. A couple of days after finishing the run, he’ll turn 86.

If not for the show, I might’ve stayed home and tried to escape via Thursday Night Football, broadcast live from the Green Bay Packers’ legendary stadium, but that wouldn’t have worked because the PA announcer, thinking of the high school kids shot in Colorado Wednesday the president’s political ally, asked everyone at the game and at home for a moment of reflection (Silence of the Lambeau?).

I couldn’t avoid reading about that the next day, but I didn’t have to see it in real time, because I was laughing at a 50-year-old movie with a 70-year-old crowd. Cleese kicked things off by saying he knew we’d be a good audience because he could see we were old. And he was right. Many of the fans in the not-quite-sold-out, 1,800-seat theatre gleefully called out lines and sound effects as if they were attending The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which coincidentally came out the same year as Holy Grail, 1975.

The film itself is pretty dated, as Cleese happily pointed out in his introductory remarks. It was also made on an extremely tight, 230,000 pound budget, most of which was supplied by various rock artists when traditional studios declined to pony up. The music stars – Elton John, Ian Anderson, and members of Led Zeppelin, Genesis and Pink Floyd – got involved mainly to take advantage of a British tax loophole at the time. It ended up making millions of dollars at the box office worldwide, returning a handsome profit, even before figuring in DVD sales, Blu-rays, and the cable and streaming residuals that are probably still paying off.

After the screening, Cleese, having exchanged his dress shoes for a pair of comfortable bunny slippers with glowing red eyes, took questions from the room. Despite his request that people make them as rude as possible, the questions were mostly fawning, meaning he had to supply the crustiness on his own. He was well up to the task, telling stories about his mates in the troupe, Terry Gilliam (“slurs his words”), Michael Palin (“never shuts up”), Eric Idle, Graham Chapman and the late Terry Jones (“his problem was that he was Welsh”), that were often complimentary but cheerfully cutting as well.

As he spoke, a younger assistant worked a laptop on a moment’s notice, projecting still photos and video clips to an overhead screen, based on Cleese’s often unscripted comments. This was especially entertaining when Cleese told a story of flying into the Vail Comedy Festival in Colorado shortly after the death of Graham Chapman, who had loved to attend the event with his pals each year. The surviving Pythons supposedly convinced Chapman's husband to let them bring their late colleague’s ashes along with them, which turned into a comedic disaster when one of them accidentally knocked the urn to the ground during a panel discussion onstage with the group.

With ashes flying and audiences in Vail and Thousand Oaks howling, the team launched into a frenzied cleanup, employing brooms and a vacuum to deal with the mess in Pythonesque fashion, finishing, then instantly responding to the Vail panel host’s question as if nothing unusual had occurred.

And in a way, nothing had. It was just straight-faced Cleese and the gang milking laughs any way they could.