In “So, Anyway . . .,” you talk about the things that made you predisposed to creativity. You write, “So, creatively, I was doubly blessed: constant relocation and parental disharmony.” What do you mean by that?
If you grow up where there’s only one version of the truth and only one way of doing things, then you’re likely to think that that is the only version. If you grow up travelling a lot or hearing arguments between your parents, you discover there’s lots of different ways of living, lots of different ways of thinking, and you can compare the two and say, “I liked the last town better.” Comparing experiences, even if it’s with your mum and your dad, makes you think about other possibilities. Whereas with people who grow up in Iowa, there’s not a lot else on show, so that they’re not terribly good at imagining other scenarios.
That comment might get you in trouble with Iowans.
Yes, it might. But, fortunately, they’re a long way away, and they don’t have a map. They wouldn’t be able to read it anyway.
Oh, boy, John, I think you just started a war with Iowa.
That’s all right. I have one going with Cambodia that they don’t even know about.
[Eyes something off in the corner.]
I’m just checking cricket. Sorry. We’re playing Australia in a big game.
The book is so much about the creativity that you do in solitude, but the things you’re most famous for were done collaboratively. How would you compare those two types of creativity?
You’re quite right. The whole business about working in groups is fascinating, and of course that’s where you want diversity, because the more diverse the opinions the more creative the group’s going to be. If you put a lot of middle-aged white men together, they’ll say at the end what a satisfactory experience it was and how they really would like to do it again. Of course, they’ve come up with fuck-all. But, if you have a very diverse group, then the danger is that you’ll get arguments that are nothing to do with the creative stuff. So you want to have someone in charge who shuts up the people who try to dominate and who encourages the shyer people who can’t push themselves forward so easily.
How would you describe that dynamic within the members of Monty Python?
We discovered early on that you couldn’t really get anything written if there were four people there, because one of the four wouldn’t like what has just been suggested. I worked with Graham. Mike and Terry sometimes wrote together. Eric always worked on his own. And Terry Gilliam didn’t really write. We told him what we wanted him to do to get from this situation to this situation, and then he’d disappear and we would see the marvellous animations that he’d come up with on the afternoon of the show.
I interviewed Eric Idle a couple of years ago, and he told me that, when he befriended George Harrison, he thought they occupied similar roles in their respective groups, as the “free-floating radical.” Which makes me want to ask which Beatle you were.
I rather sympathize with Paul McCartney, because I thought that John Lennon was a bit over-lionized, and some people rather took it out on McCartney, who seemed to be a very nice member of the group. I found Eric the easiest to work with at the committee stage. He could let go of things. Whereas I found Jonesy very difficult, because he believed strongly in everything and you could never really get him to shift. And Chapman wasn’t listening anyway. Gilliam wasn’t there. And Michael was simply agreeing with everyone, because he hates conflict.
You’ve written about how you butted heads with Terry Jones, who died in January. Was that more productive or detrimental to the creative process?
It was more detrimental. Terry was much more likely to come up with strange, bigger ideas, like the soldiers running towards the Germans shouting out the deadly joke. You remember that? Or the Ministry of Silly Walks, or Mr. Creosote, the hugely fat man in the restaurant. But he cared about everything, and he was always sure that he was right. Even if I stood my ground and argued with him and the general feeling was that my idea was better, the next day he would say, “Last night I was thinking, and I really do feel—” And we’d be back again in the same argument. Where he was really wonderful was directing. He did a phenomenal job on “Life of Brian,” and the stuff he directed in “Holy Grail” was the best stuff. Gilliam was wonderful at images, but Jonesy was much better at shooting the comedy.
Probably your most important collaborative relationship was with Graham Chapman, which started at Cambridge. You wrote, “Graham, like me, carried a grudge against the nonsense we had been fed at school in the name of religion.”
We used to write a lot of sketches with a Biblical background. People would come in and see the Bible out and say, “Oh, you’ve been writing sketches!”
It seems you were both rebelling against a certain kind of authority.
People said we were anti-authoritarian. I think the truth is we were anti-bad-authority. I mean, you have to have authority. You can’t just dispense with traffic lights.
You’ve also said you were more logical and Graham would add lunacy. How do you balance those two things?
When we couldn’t figure out what to write about, we would take a thesaurus and I would read words out. He’d say, “Cucumber.” “Cucumber? Hmm. No.” “All right. Plummet.” This actually happened. He said, “I like plummet.” I said, “So do I. It’s a funny word.” Pffffft . . . splat! “So what would plummet?” He said, “A sheep would plummet, if it tried to fly.” Then we had the sketch.
As to when do you go off the rails, the answer is when somebody says something that’s really funny. Suddenly you realize there is a comedy idea there that wasn’t there five seconds before, and it’s almost as good as an orgasm. David Sherlock, who was Graham’s boyfriend, would be downstairs, and we’d be upstairs, and suddenly he would hear an enormous amount of noise—shrieking and drumming of feet—and that was the moment when we both saw that there was a great comic possibility.
You had such a special dynamic with Graham, but it also had its challenges, right?
By the second series, he was already drinking seriously. It happened very fast. When I used to share a flat with him before, he was a very mild guy—until he got alcohol in him, and then he would become quite aggressive. He became more unreliable. He couldn’t remember his words. We had to abandon one sketch that he and I had written, because he literally couldn’t get his words right in front of the audience.
You’ve now lost two of the Pythons. Can I ask how it feels to have been part of this famous group that’s now diminished by two?
