Michael Palin Tries to Explain the Root of Monty Python’s Tensions
By this point, Monty Python may be better known for their petty squabbling than their comedy. Although, to be fair, a number of classic sketches were based around ridiculous arguments.
As we've mentioned before, John Cleese and Eric Idle have been locked into a prolonged social media feud, stemming from Idle’s dissatisfaction with the group’s current management, by Terry Gilliam’s daughter Holly Gilliam. Last we checked, the beef was in the “threatening to leak damaging emails” stage.
Less vocally cranky has been Cleese and Idle’s fellow Python Michael Palin. While Palin hasn’t publicly engaged in the Python spat, that doesn’t mean that interviewers don’t still ask him to weigh in on the behind the scenes tension.
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Most recently, Palin guested on The Louis Theroux Podcast and was asked by Theroux about the sense that “everything is not fully harmonious” with the Pythons. “You know, you sort of get on, but at times there’s little wrinkles. And in your diaries you talk about stresses at the time. Is there a way of talking about any of that that’s not likely to make things awkward?” the host asked.
Per The Daily Mail, Palin responded, “I can’t remember absolute specifics, but if something’s very successful — Python became very successful — then issues like who thought of what at the time, or who thought of the name here and there, becomes kind of important to the people who thought about it.”
“So it’s not a big issue,” the Ripping Yarns star continued, “but if you find someone else saying, ‘We had this idea that day, and we wrote this sketch,’ and you know patently that you were the ones who had the original idea, that didn’t seem fair. The problem was that there are a number of sketches in the films and on TV that are absolutely clear — they have not been changed, they work perfectly — and they may be written by Graham (Chapman) and John (Cleese), or myself and Terry (Jones) or Eric. But then there’s another area where it’s less clear — ideas would come in. The Ministry of Silly Walks, I think, went through about three or four different rewrites from various people within the group.”
Palin went on to explain, “You’d say, ‘Well, we’ve gone as far as we can with this, why don’t you take it away?’ And people would take it away, and so things became co-authored. But it was never written down, there were no contracts.”
When asked about the business side of this debate over authorship, Palin said that the problems weren’t “entirely” financial, but admitted, “I’m being a little bit cagey here, because there are certain complications in material ownership. Everything was really divided up and, and everybody got a bit.”
He did note that Idle “managed to get a deal” giving him all the proceeds of his song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” which he wrote.
Hopefully he gave a cut of his proceeds to the drunken boom mic operator who helped him to record it.
