Terry Jones and the method in the madness

Monty Python’s Michael Palin, Eric Idle (back), Terry Jones and Graham Chapman

The death of Terry Jones, at 77, was a cause of sadness to millions of us for whom the Pythons were, and remain, a huge part of our lives. Dementia got him in the end. But it’s not disrespectful to say he and his cohorts were professionally demented performers. Now Terry has joined Graham Chapman in the Choir Invisible.

What have the Pythons ever done for us? So much. While the world became ever madder – and continues to do so – the two Terrys, John, Graham, Michael and Eric liberated our imaginations and gave us stuff to rejoice in, to mimic, to remember.

“He’s not the Messiah,” said Terry Jones’s character in The Life of Brian. “He’s a very naughty boy.” But the Python collective, six very naughty boys, were our messiahs. Silly walking became our preferred method of perambulation. I’m a Lumberjack became our anthem. The Dead Parrot sketch deserved, all on its own, the Nobel Prize for Literature. And admit it, dear reader, how often have you yearned to smack someone in the face with a dead haddock?

It has to be said, callooh callay, that Monty Python was the modern incarnation of an old British tradition, one of transcendental nonsense. The New Testament to older testaments of literary dementia, of verbal and visual lunacy. Of method in madness. One thinks, for instance, of the very peculiar mind of artist, illustrator, writer and musician Edward Lear. This one-man band of comic invention, this laureate of the limerick, gave us The Owl and the Pussy-Cat (who, you may recall, went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat, taking some honey and plenty of money) a full century before John Cleese discovered that his hovercraft was full of eels.

When Lear wasn’t publishing scholarly works on European art and architecture, he was conjuring absurdities galore – as was his fellow gifted absurdist Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, whose extravagant imaginings gave us the glories of Alice and the most psychedelic menagerie in the history of literature. Behold the Mad Hatter, the Walrus and the Carpenter, Tweedles Dum and Dee and scores more. Like the Pythons, the product of a highly educated mind going perfectly potty.

And the Pythons were, of course, predated by the bipolar Spike Milligan, who used his ongoing bouts of madness to create the Goons. While Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers were perfect co-conspirators, the cast of characters came from Spike. Bluebottle. Major Dennis Bloodnok, the Famous Eccles. Neddie Seagoon, Henry Crun and his beloved Minnie, Count Jim Moriarty and the rest – with the sightless medium of radio allowing Spike and the sound effects team to conjure images of a St Paul’s Cathedral with hair growing on its dome, or Eccles driving a team of huskies through the streets of London in full summer, surrounded by his own personal snowstorm. In dealing with his own demons, Spike Milligan provided the perfect therapy for the Cold War.

Thus the Pythons had a venerable English tradition (though Terry Jones was Welsh, of course) to give them momentum, with the Goons in particular educating the audience into imagining the unimaginable – although some influence might have come from America’s only surrealist comics, the Marx Brothers. Groucho was great at silly walks.

Now, with Trump in the White House and Boris in No.10, the world is beyond satire or parody. What have the Pythons, the Goons, Lear and Carroll ever done for us? They gave us the anti-depressant of laughter.

Vale Terry.