Eric Idle of Monty Python on His New Memoir

HARI SREENIVASAN: You decided on a memoir. Why?

ERIC IDLE, AUTHOR, ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE: Well, our 50th anniversary of Monty Python is coming up next year and I thought we’re going to have to answer questions. So let me see what I can remember and write it down before I forget it.

SREENIVASAN: Because someone else is going to write it if you don’t.

IDLE: That’s the other thing, yes. I mean that was what Winston Churchill said, “History will be kind to me because I intend to write it.”

SREENIVASAN: Why do you think Monty Python has lasted 50 years or at least that it’s still funny?

IDLE: That is, to me, kind of a wonderful mystery. And I think partly — so there was the fact that it’s not rooted in time but the comedy is generic, their characters but they’re not like this particular president or like “Saturday Night Live”. When you look at old ones, you think, “Oh, your Gerald Ford fell over a lot.” So you have to remember all that to begin to love, whereas Python’s after satire and the characters are just so silly or generic people.

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SREENIVASAN: You know you’re known for being a funny man but when you — as you start out in the book, you talk about kind of difficult childhood, at least the boarding school phase and even before that losing your father at an early age but all of that helped you become the funny man that you are now. How was that?

IDLE: Well, I think that people who are comedians are very weird people. They have been damaged early because they have things to do, to stand on stage and ask people to laugh at you, you know. And then they become sort of addicted to that bark that humans make, the laugh. And that becomes a kind of thing you seek out as you pursue it professionally. I remember going to my daughter’s school and going into pre-K and knowing exactly who were the funny kids. They’re right there. They’re funny right from that time.

SREENIVASAN: Well, how do you tell? How can you tell?

IDLE: There’s just an attitude. And a lot of it is attitude because comedy is a sort of, I think, it’s a way of thinking. So when you look at a news event, you immediately interpret it as funny and looking for what is interesting or wrong about it. [23:40:00] And I think that’s a way of thinking that makes comedy or comedy writers — that’s how they do it.

SREENIVASAN: Did this early boarding school period kind of teach you a healthy disrespect for authority?

IDLE: Very much so. Yes, because you could only have fun by disobeying the school rules. So on — it’s like being in the military or in a prison. You’re on the surface, you’re behaving properly like this but really are going over the wall to meet goals or get there or, you know, get cigarettes and things like that. So I think that that was one of those things. And the other thing is you’re seriously mocking some of the things they say to you. Although you don’t ever tell them that, you know because we were beaten with canes. And then they would say, “Oh, it’s for your own good.” You know, well, if it’s for my own good, why don’t I beat you and it will be nice for you too, you know. So yes, there’s an underlying text, subtext which is the truth. And I think that was through, say in communist societies, where people want to like to say anything but underneath, there was this underground humor going all the time.

SREENIVASAN: But one of your first visit you talk about that actually got the attention of — it was actually written by John Cleese but you were in college at the time. This is a biblical weather forecast.

IDLE: Yes, it was started as a biblical newscast which is called BBC B.C. Good evening. It’s the first chapter of the news, you know. And they were very college kind of jokes but then the weather forecast, it came on and he’s talking about the place, you know, locusts followed by life, some flies and on Tuesday, frogs. And so I did that in my college view and it was written by John Cleese. So this is my second term and after the show, he came up and I met him. This is like February 1963.

SREENIVASAN: And you guys decided to be friends ever since?

IDLE: Well, no. He said — he asked me to join the Footlights which is a club in Cambridge just for comedy and I hadn’t heard of it. And he said, “Well, come along anyway. You have to audition to get in.” And I got in and then my life changed because that sort of became my college. You know, they gave lunches. We had a bar that would open at 10:30 at night. It’s fantastic. The pubs closed in England at 10:00 so it was really nice. And then I met all these really funny people and learned about comedy, which is the only way you can by actually getting up on stage and doing it.

SREENIVASAN: You had an amazing opportunity at the BBC to run with this group of friends and write this material. Did they understand what they were buying?

IDLE: No, because we didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know what we were going to do.

SREENIVASAN: Well, you’re in this meeting and you don’t know what’s going on?

IDLE: We had no idea and we just said we don’t know. We don’t know where — we have band. No, we don’t have band. Film? Yes, we’ll have film. And the point was they should all just go away on May 13. It’s extraordinary. And they knew us. We’d written for Frost. We were all professionals. We’d done children shows. John Cleese was already a star because he’d been on the Frost Report so they trusted him and they really didn’t want to know because it was a new slot. They were opening up after 10:30 at night on a Sunday when the queen came on on the horse and then television close down. So they didn’t really mind. They were just exploring that. Well, what happens if we put on a show on a Sunday night after the pubs have closed? And they have no idea who would be watching and they have a lot of complaints but they were very good. They just ignored them and they let us do what we wanted. And they never even read the scripts. They just, “Oh, it’s that thing. Yes, let’s do that thing.”

SREENIVASAN: But when you guys were in the room writing Monty Python sketches, you are not necessarily looking at this as actors?

IDLE: No, we’re not actors. We’re writers. So that was one of the original things about it. The whole show was written by the six of us and we acted everything. And so, you know, even the women’s roles, we would do them because we wanted more parts. You know, six rows, six people to go around. You know what I mean? And so we played everything and that was a kind of also gave it a sort of madness quality to it but the writers were in charge always.

SREENIVASAN: The name of the book Always Look on the Bright Side of Life is named after the song that you wrote. And it is one of the most iconic scenes in the history of Monty Python. There you are on crucifixes. [23:45:00] Always look on the bright side of life. And apparently, it is now still the number one song being played at funerals in the U.K.

IDLE: Well, that’s pretty heavily ironic when you’re being crucified to say, “Look on the bright side,” you know. Not a lot of songs to go. But what happens when it started to be sung by — in the Falklands War? The ex-Mashafia was hit by an Exocet and the sailors sat on the deck for three hours singing that song whilst they’re waiting to be rescued. And then when they were doing the — well, was it the Gulf War, the RAF bombers who did those super low-level things, when they were shooting up to go, they would sing Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. So it became a song of — when things are really bad and bleak, it became a way to sing and to cheer up.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. Do you want this at your funeral?

IDLE: I don’t know. I told my wife I want to sit on my face and tell me that you love me but I’ve left a bribe for her to say something really awful. Get extra money — not that, something else. If you’ll say that, I’ve left a little extra bonus money. If she comes up with a memorial.

SREENIVASAN: When that movie came out, A Life of Brian, there were protests in the United States or protests in the U.K., there are protests all over. You had rabbis, you had Christian, all kinds of people could not deal with what you were trying to do at the time.

IDLE: No, no. We were supposed to come here and do promotion. And they said, “Forget it. It’s on the news”. You know, people are protesting. They were picketing Warner Brothers in L.A. and said Warner Brothers are the agents of the devil. So they were — you know, they didn’t need us because at all — once you’re on the news —

SREENIVASAN: You’ve got people listening.

IDLE: Yes, every night. You couldn’t possibly beat that.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. And so it was a blockbuster success.

IDLE: For an usher.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. And then you also have other major films that every 12- year-old boy remembers, Holy Grail. I also wonder what is it about these movies that goes beyond the 12-year-old boy?

IDLE: Well, I think it’s very funny. I think grails got a lot of action, you know. He’s not taking so seriously in filmmaking terms, although it does look like a real film and they’re behaving in childish ways, you know. And they’re having some cows thrown at them.

SREENIVASAN: What’s not to like about that?

IDLE: You know, we were actually filming it in nasty muds and horrible situation. So it didn’t, you know —

SREENIVASAN: But you were miserable when you were there. The misery was real.

IDLE: And that’s always funny. It’s really unpleasant. You can be fairly sure it’s funny.

SREENIVASAN: This is one function of your life being part of Monty Python. Since then, you’ve gone on to write music, write plays. A play that is familiar to a lot of people in the United States is Spamalot. It did critically end at the box office quite well.

IDLE: Well, I was trying to write a musical. We’ve written one about cricket. She’s clearly not going to work in America, OK. And then I suddenly thought, actually the Grail is perfect because it’s a bit like a parody of Arthur. And also you could do it on stage. She didn’t need horses and it’s really funny. And it seems to be always about to be a song. I mean surely I’m not dead yet was always in the Holy Grail but it wasn’t. So we got to adapt it for the stage and we had to change it a lot because there’s 98 characters in the film. It has no shape, whatsoever and is stopped by the police just stopping it, you know. So — but I had Mike Nichols to work with. Although I think I don’t buy them. So that was great fun adapting it for the theater. It was just really great fun. And there are 25 million people who watched that play and were about to do it as a movie.

SREENIVASAN: This has also afforded you a fairly fantastic life as you write in the book. You have gone to sort of hobnob with royalty, whether it’s rock & roll or the actual Prince or some amazing people that you talk about in the book. But that’s not what the kid that was growing up in that town was destined to do or be.

IDLE: Right. Well, that’s sort of in a way because we were part of this generation who were all the 60s who invented everything because there was nothing there. There were bomb sites and rationing and it was really awful. There wasn’t a comedy show there three years before that we are now on. And that — what happened was that all the rock and rollers loved what we were doing because they love comedy and so they sort us out. [23:50:00] We didn’t go looking after — looking for them.

SREENIVASAN: You became really good friends with George Harrison. What did he teach you over time?

IDLE: He was amazing. I mean he — I always think of him now as my closest I ever had to a guru because he was very good. I was very depressed at the time, my marriage was breaking up, and he was just always so positive and always so generous to everybody.

SREENIVASAN: And it didn’t have to do with the fact that he was so successful or rich.

IDLE: No, because being the most successful things in the world and he realized they were going to die. And very early on, you can’t take it with you. I mean it’s one of the best examples. You know, so what? You were there but you’re still going to die so he began preparing himself for his own death which I wasn’t around for and he really have no — he really had no regrets or fear.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

IDLE: And that was great.

SREENIVASAN: You also write a lot about Robin Williams.

IDLE: Yes.

SREENIVASAN: You shared a long friendship. I mean you guys at vacation with your families.

IDLE: Yes. Robin was a very good friend and just a wonderful man, a really really generous, lovely genius and that was just so heart-rending. It was the last thing I wrote for the book. I finished the book. You’ve avoided Robin and I thought, well, I’ve got to write about him. And because people like to know what he was like. They obviously know he’s comedy but what was he really like? And so I thought I had to write a chapter about him. And that was hard because I think I’ve been pretending he actually wasn’t really gone.

SREENIVASAN: There’s a streak of kind of tragedies of some of your friends and colleagues as you go by, some to alcoholism or take their own lives. Do you feel, I don’t know if it’s survivor’s guilt or what could I have done, how is it possible that these people made these choices?

IDLE: I think you know, spoiler alert, we all die. And when you get to my age, a lot of people — I probably know more people who are dead than they’re alive. And some just — I mean in the last few years, I mean, you know, Mike Nichols and Carrie Fisher and, you know, a lot of really funny people who I relied on in my life just suddenly went and left.

SREENIVASAN: Has your relationship with the Monty Python gang changed over time?

IDLE: Yes.

SREENIVASAN: Now that you see them with the benefit of hindsight and age and what’s worked and what hasn’t and how their lives are changed.

IDLE: Sure because you’re all going — you know, you’re all going through the same process. And it’s a raft of the Medusa. We’re all sliding off the life raft and the sharks are waiting. So Python is really good fun to be with. They’re all really great fun. And when we’re together, it’s still just as funny. I mean it’s really funny and I like that. So we do get together now and again. But now we have much more time for each other.

SREENIVASAN: Yes?

IDLE: Yes, much more because we don’t have to do anything together. I mean we did ought to say goodbye and that was 2014. And now, you know, it’s beyond the possibility of doing anything.

SREENIVASAN: Have you all gotten funnier?

IDLE: I think a little bit, yes. I think we’re still very funny, certainly with each other. I think so, yes, but I think we always were. It was a very strange group. It was self-selected and it was all and it worked so we just kept it going.

SREENIVASAN: You know, there’s a section at the end of the book. I’m just going to quote it. It says, “Laughter is the best revenge. One day, the sun will die. One day, the galaxy will die. One day, the entire universe will die. I’m not feeling too good myself. So what have I learned over my long and weird life? Well, firstly that there are two kinds of people and I don’t much care for either of them. Secondly, when faced with a difficult choice, either way, it’s often best. Thirdly, always have a party when people begin to play the bongos.” Any other advice that you like to leave out?

IDLE: No, I think that pretty much covers a lot of time and advice.

SREENIVASAN: Eric Idle, thanks so much.

IDLE: My pleasure.