And Now for Something Completely Different

A collection of sketches. The Monty Python team's television programme had caught on in Britain. This film is a re-shoot for cinema of sketches chosen from its first two series. So there is no new material. The texts are the same, the performers are the same, and the difference is only in picture quality and in some scenes being shot outdoors. The reason is plain. The production was made to introduce the team in America, where the television programme was not yet being shown. The financing came from the head of the British arm of Playboy. The contents include the team's best known pieces. The man trying to return his dead parrot, the lumberjack song, the competition for the year's silliest young man, and the old women who leave nobody alone on the pavement. Terry Gilliam's animations sit between them. Made with collage, these passages are the only thing joining the sketches together. What the narrative is interested in is not plot but cutting: most of the sketches end without resolving, and that is deliberate; the team refused to write jokes that had endings. Re-shooting for cinema weakened some sketches. On television there was a live audience laughing and that laughter is absent here; the gaps can be heard. The film is counted as the team's first work in cinema and, unlike their later features, it builds no connected story from beginning to end. Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Carol Cleveland are in the cast. Ian MacNaughton directed. Who it is for: anyone who has never seen Python humour and anyone curious about the period. Who it is not for: anyone who watched the television programme; all of it will be familiar and some sketches fall below the originals.