That old TV Guide review of the then new-to-America “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” was recently posted on “Twitter/X” by conservative writer and commentator John Podhoretz. He implied in his tweet that he didn’t know who Cleveland Amory was, but I do (John’s ten years younger than me). Amory is not just an obscure critic from the murky past: in the Sixties into the Seventies, Amory was a famous writer, critic, media personality and animal rights activist, a ubiquitous public intellectual whose pronouncements were frequently accepted as invaluable contributions to public wisdom because of their source.
These days, I would assume any pundit who chose an image of himself smoking a pipe was a pompous ass, but back then my father smoked one (though never in public) so that bias had yet to be fully formed. Nor was I quite as contemptuous of critics then as I am now, having watched a series of ignorant and biased Washington Post theater reviewers marginalize my professional theater company for 20 years on the theory that no stage work produced before 1990 had anything useful to say to the enlightened and politically sophisticated.
I also acknowledge that throughout cultural history, many works and artists that later were recognized as iconic and immortal escaped the appreciation of contemporary critics, and sometimes audiences as well. The reverse is almost as common, a piece of junk being hailed as a classic until enough time passes too perceive that it was anything but.
Not long ago, Grace, who was a great admirer of film director George Stevens for his documentary work in Europe during World War II (See “Five Came Back,” which Grace watched repeatedly while trying to recover from her leg pain), talked me into watching “Giant,” one of Stevens’ most honored films. (He also directed “Swing Time,” “Shane,” and “The Diary of Anne Frank,” so Stevens was already in my directors Hall of Fame.) The film is famous for containing the final performance of James Dean, the method-acting legend whose premature demise (in a car crash) supposedly cut short a brilliant film career. I had only seen his annoying performance in “Rebel Without A Cause,” which I attributed to the script (and, I confess, I was pleasantly distracted by the radiant Natalie Wood), but in “Giant,” Dean was just bad: self-indulgent, scenery-chewing, over-wrought. He made Rock Hudson’s usual blah acting seem professional by comparison. Dean’s performance is method acting at its worst; he made me really appreciate Marlon Brando. And yet…the critics of the day loved him.
As Claudine Gay might say, context is everything. When the Pythons debuted in the U.S., there was nothing like their humor. In Great Britain, comics like Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and others had at least given British audiences a taste of the surreal mix of satire, clever wordplay, literate hi-jinx, slapstick, black humor and abject silliness that John Cleese, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman,Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin developed into a sui generis genre. Amory was not alone in “not getting it.” Nevertheless, he was supposed to be an authority on such things.
He was completely, unequivocally, wrong. Authorities often are. The trick is figuring out when.
Ethics Alarms 
Not only have we seen “Five Came Back”, we have the book!
I have to admit that “Monty Python” never appealed to me, but it could be a generational thing. PBS was showing reruns of it here and there when I was growing up. Like “Doctor Who”, though, everything flew right past me. Maybe that’s why my parents let us watch “Time Bandits” – all of the racy stuff went over our heads.
Although, we did see Cleese on stage last November during his traveling show “An Evening with the Late John Cleese”. The footage shown of the surviving members of the troupe befuddling an interviewer when an urn with the ashes of the late Graham Chapman was accidentally knocked over by using a dustbuster to sweep said ashes up made me laugh so hard I was in physical pain. We also met Cleese in person at Indiana Comic Convention in March and he was friendly and gracious autograph signer.
I used to collect TV Guides – I had about a 30-year old collection – until I got married and moved into a space-limited apartment. I miss those little digests. The reviewer, by then, was a little man in front of a typewriter.
But as an occasional critic myself, I know that the real trick for critics is to recognize something that is innovative, bold, risky and brilliant even when it personally doesn’t appeal to you. That is, appreciate the skill, technique and the artist’s achievement of his or her (or their) objectives. Most of the time, I found Robin Williams hard to watch: exhausting, too frenetic, to me, obviously dealing with emotional issues. But I knew the first time I saw him that he was brilliant and destined for huge stardom. I don’t “like” Meryl Streep as an actress, but she’s obviously terrific, just not the kind of terrific I appreciate.
Was it the late Roger Ebert who thought that he should review films based on whether or not people would like them?
There have been a few. Pauline Kael was the opposite. I remember that I gave up on her when she said the middle “King Kong”—the one with the guy in a gorilla suit and Kong fighting off jets on the Twin Towers—was as good as the original.
The one with Jessica Lange? Ew, no.
Unfortunately, Cleese has become a leftist scold in his dotage, re-tweeting posts by the worst of paid democrat shills and lefty operatives. A common response to him on X is some form of “We remember when you were funny”.
Too bad. At least we can still watch the re-runs from when he was game for satirizing and mocking most anything.
He always kind of was. Just more virulently so in these latter days.
But the Pythons, unlike today’s propagandists in comedy, were completely willing to ridicule all sides of the political spectrum, bcause all sides deserve it.
I’m a little mystified anyone would not get Monty Python right out of the box. Maybe Cleveland Amory was in grade school and high school before “educational films” became a thing. But surely, he had to have had some exposure to the British (government produced) television and documentaries they were so mercilessly lampooning.
Except that Amory’s review is right.
!!!!!!!
Your mother was a hamster…..
Look, no one is saying Monty Python didn’t have funny moments.
They clearly showed an ability to learn and adapt – Holy Grail (’75) and Life of Brian (’79) both demonstrate that they could break out of the never-ending-sketch format of the TV show and put together reasonably amusing compositions.
I would go back and watch the entire multi-year series in order to see if the sketch show demonstrated improvement. But I’ve got better things to do.
I have the complete show scripts among my favorite bathroom books. In some ways the scripts are more impressive than the skits they turned into.
I could see that being enjoyable. I bet their writing was close to flawless. You can tell one screen where they get very awkward and clumsy.
For John Cleese fare though-
His Fawlty Towers blows Monty Python out of the water.
A not uncommon critical verdict. Definitely the best of FT was superior to the best of MPFC.
If nothing else, Amory was quite wrong about calling Terry Jones English – and it can be gratuitously offensive, too, from not showing enough respect to do the homework.
There you go!
“When the Pythons debuted in the U.S., there was nothing like their humor.”
Correct. We had good choices for humor.
Ha. Watch any of the sitcoms from before 1969 and see how many still seem funny. The test isn’t whether everyone finds them funny, but whether as many people find them funny now as before, and the people who don’t are irrelevant. A classic is comedy that holds on to public appreciation despite the passage of time, changing styles, and evolving culture. I have never found the Marx Brothers funny—but I can’t deny them their staying power. Classics.
All of the Pythons haven’t done as well financially as might have been expected. Gilliam seems to have done the best.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13073241/monty-python-financial-problems-john-cleese-divorce-spamalot-royalties.html
Some situations have been self-inflicted, like Cleese being on his fourth wife and still paying off a $20 million settlement to his third.
Graham Chapman dying, of AIDS, I think, and Terry Jones getting dementia didn’t help. It seems like Eric Idle and (my favorite) Michael Palin have prospered.