By Dennis Daniel

Okay, I think I need to establish right off the bat that I’m one of those Monty Python fanatics.  You know, one of those aggravating, obnoxious people that know every line of the “Dead Parrot Sketch” and delight in torturing anyone within ear shot with my John Cleese impersonation, shouting at the top of my lungs, “That parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! He has expired…etc. etc.” Ad infinitem, ad nauseam. To put it as succinctly as I can, Monty Python is in my DNA. So when the opportunity presented itself to actually interview Terry Jones, one of the (gulp) Pythons, my journalistic objectiveness had …”expired. Gone to meet its maker.”

At the risk of sounding nauseatingly egotistical, I’ve interviewed some pretty darn famous folks in my day.  Always maintaining my cool detached professional persona.  But this was Terry-fuckin’-Jones of Monty-fuckin’-Python!  This was an epiphany, dudes.

It’s no secret that as a member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Terry and his cohorts are responsible for having written some of the most innovative and absurd comedy in the English language. Of the six members, Terry was the one who played female roles the most, what the Pythons call “Pepperpots.”

I pee in my pants every time I see him playing the waitress in the famous Spam sketch, letting the patrons know they have such diverse menu items as “Spam, Spam bacon and Spam, Spam eggs sausage and Spam, Spam Spam Spam Spam Tomato and Spam, Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Baked beans Spam Spam Spam and Spam,” etc. etc. Terry is also the fellow who sits at the organ in the beginning of the TV show, with wild hair and totally naked, as he hits the “da da da da da daaaaaaa” keys.

Another Terry Jones classic is, of course, Mr. Creosote, the projectile vomiting/exploding obese man from Monty Python’s Meaning Of Life. Suffice to say, if you’ve ever seen this scene, you’ve never forgotten it.  Terry told me his reason for doing it was to create a scene “in the worst possible taste.” Mission accomplished bro.

Terry also took the helm as co-director of Monty Python & The Holy Grail (along with Terry Gilliam) and director of Monty Python’s Life Of Brain and Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life. In essence, this is the Python who likes to be in charge.

Being quite the Oxford educated intellectual as well, Terry has written scholarly books about Chaucer, as well as children’s books.  Lately, he has turned his satirical pen towards George Bush and his “War On Terror.”

His new book, Terry Jones’s War on the War on Terror, compiles a series of wickedly satirical columns Jones published in Britain’s The Observer, The Guardian and The Independent during the past four years.

In one column, he takes pointers from Donald Rumsfeld’s approach to information extraction (“The thing is if people don’t say where they’re going after choir practice, this country is at risk. So I have been applying a certain amount of pressure on my son to tell me where he’s going. To begin with I simply put a bag over his head and chained him to a radiator…”)

Jones was in town for the Broadway premier of Monty Python’s Spamalot and to promote his two books Who Murdered Chaucer? and Terry Jones’s War on the War on Terror.  I was lucky enough to have him as a guest on my radio show and the following are extracts from that two hour interview dealing with his Terror book and his feelings about turning Monty Python & The Holy Grail into a Broadway musical.

TERRY: Over the past four years since 9/11 I’ve been writing articles about the so called “war” for newspapers in England and Carl Bromley, one of the editors at the publishing division of The Nation, emailed me and asked if they could publish a collection because they haven’t been seen in America.

So, it came out in January, published by Nation Books. 

DENNIS: What inspired the articles specifically?

TERRY: Well, I wrote them because I just really couldn’t believe what was going on! It seemed to me after 9/11, our great leaders Tony Blair and George Bush…every single action they seemed to take was designed to create the opposite result of what they said was going to happen.  I mean, for example, after 9/11 George Bush said, “we have to catch the evil perpetrators of this evil crime.” Well, if you’re going to catch the perpetrators of a crime, what you do is bring in the FBI and the police, then you act with secrecy, speed and you catch them by surprise. What you DON’T do is what George Bush proceeded to do, which was to tell the evil perpetrators where they were going to look for them! “We’re going to look for you in Afghanistan!” And WHEN you were going to look for them! “We’re going to look for you in two weeks time!” And WHAT you’re going to do! “We’re going to bomb you!”  I mean, by that time there isn’t going to be a single evil perpetrator of an evil crime left in Afghanistan!  It’s like hide and seek! “Okay, I’m gonna count to one hundred and then I’m coming to look for you, alright?” It is nonsense. It is ridiculous.

DENNIS: Ya think? (BOTH LAUGH)

TERRY:  Then Tony Blair says he wants to make us “safe from terrorist attack.” Well, we ARE safe from terrorist attack.  I mean, since the IRA stopped bombing London…that’s when we weren’t safe from terrorist attack. We had constant terrorist attacks in London over the 80’s and early 90’s.  Now, we’re not under threat by the IRA anymore so we’re not under threat for terrorism.  The only way we can be under threat for terrorism is if Tony Blair goes and starts bombing Iraq, a country that has never threatened us in the slightest and is no danger to us! Now, we’re on the front line for terrorist attack! Thank you very much Tony Blair! It is mind-blowing!

I feel like the child in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The Emperor is sold these new clothes by these tailors who say, “Oh, it’s a beautiful cut. Of course, only stupid people can’t see the clothes.” The Emperor doesn’t want to look stupid, so he puts the clothes on…but of course, there are no clothes, he’s naked.  Since everyone else was told the story, everyone else goes along with it so they don’t look stupid. It takes a small child in the crowd to finally say, “The Emperor is naked!”

It’s exactly how I feel!  Everyone is going along with this ludicrous “War On Terror.”  I just can’t believe what’s going on in the world.

DENNIS: When you think about it, the “war on terror” is not even a war against any particular enemy or nation.

TERRY: Exactly! The “War On Terror” is nothing more than the act of declaring war on an abstract noun. Now you could say, “No, we’re declaring war on terrorists, not on abstract nouns,” but a terrorist doesn’t even exist until he’s committed a terrorist act.  Just substitute something else for the word “terror” to make you see how ludicrous this is.  Let’s say you declared war on “murder.” “Now we’ve declared war on murder and we’re not going to rest until ever murderer and every would-be murderer has been caught and brought to justice.” This is completely ridiculous! You can’t catch every one! Besides, they’re not even murderers until they’ve actually murdered someone! You can’t stop something happening before it happens!  It’s a very dangerous situation that we’re now in and the people behind Bush, with his concepts of pre-emptive strikes around the world.  They are a recipe for permanent warfare, disaster, chaos and I’m sorry to say, more terrorism.  Have you ever heard of the “Project For The New American Century”?

DENNIS: That was some report that was put together before Bush’s presidency about how to create situations for war, wasn’t it?

TERRY: If you really want to know the agenda of the people behind Bush, go to their website.  It’s called www.newamericancentury.org. It was a think tank that was set up by Richard Pearl, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in 1997.  Since then, they’ve been publishing reports, articles and essays setting up their agenda about what they will do when they get into power, which of course, they now are.  In September 2000, a year before Bush became President, they set out their plan in a document called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” In that document they say one of their first objectives to get into power is to go into Iraq. They say that the regime of Saddam Hussein gives ample justification for this, but we must never forget that the regime change there is secondary to the importance of establishing, what they call, an “American force presence in the Middle East.”  So there you have it! They’re written it down!  This is a report that is actually signed by Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pearl.  They say, quite honestly, and to do them justice, this is what we’re going to do.  So you see, they’re not going to pull out American troops. It’s got nothing to do with establishing democracy. What they want is for there to be civil war and unrest in Iraq which gives the American military an excuse to keep staying there.  That’s the whole point, to have an American force presence there.

DENNIS: Jeezus.

TERRY: The whole point of the thing is to up spending on defense from 3.4 of the Gross National Product to 3.9. Of course, this is very beneficial to companies like Halliburton. They say it’s going to be difficult to get the American people to go along with this extra spending on defense because it will mean cutting back on a lot of social programs, which they’re now doing, of course.

DENNIS: Right.

TERRY: So what they say we need is some cataclysmic new disaster, like a new Pearl Harbor.  They’re saying we actually need something like 9/11 to kick- start our agenda.  It’s actually written down in black and white a year before Bush gets into power and a year before 9/11.

DENNIS: That’s absolutely astonishing.

TERRY: I mean, you don’t have to believe they had anything to do with 9/11.  It’s just really creepy to know 9/11 was what they were hoping and praying for, and they got it.

DENNIS: I’m sure oil has something to do with all this as well.

TERRY: Well, I imagine that’s why they want to establish a presence in the Middle East.  I don’t suppose they’re doing it for…

DENNIS: …all that sand.

TERRY: All that sand. (BOTH LAUGH)

TERRY JONES ON SPAMALOT

Since Terry co-directed Monty Python & The Holy Grail, I was abuzz with wonder as to his feelings about the new musical, written by fellow Python Eric Idle and based on his film.

DENNIS: What where your initial thoughts when Eric first proposed the concept of turning Holy Grail into a musical?

TERRY: I love the idea of making musicals. I thought, “Well, that’s great if Eric wants to do it.” I read some of the early scripts and he sent us CD’s of the songs. I just loved the Andrew Lloyd Webber take-off, “Where Is The Song That Goes Like This.” It’s such a good parody and brings the audience’s attention to the nature of the musical. The way he had it originally, he followed it with “He’s Not Dead Yet!” and I thought that really wasn’t an original song.  I felt he needed to cap the Andrew Lloyd Weber song, not go into something that’s sort of a cliché of a song. Well, Eric really worked on that…the pacing…and in the end, he’s done a really good job. The song that follows it now is great.  It’s a song that works in its own right.

DENNIS: Was there ever a doubt that the film could be translated to a live stage musical?

TERRY: It was Eric’s baby so I really didn’t think about it that hard. I never imagined it would be as successful and terrific as it is. It’s wonderful to actually see it flowering.

DENNIS: What did the other Pythons think?

TERRY: I haven’t really asked them.  I mean, I saw them all at the party after the opening but in that atmosphere you can’t say anything else apart from how wonderful it is.

DENNIS: Where you happy with the show, Terry?

TERRY: Well, I thought it was terrific good fun.  It’s great to see the audience loving it. I suppose I had reservations as far as…well…the idea of doing scenes from a film on stage. I just don’t get the point of it. They do them terribly well…I mean, they really are good…but (laughs) I just quite don’t understand what that’s about.  It isn’t really “Python.” It is very much Eric.

Coming away from Spamalot I was thinking, “Oh God, the film isn’t about this. It’s such nonsense. It’s nonsensical. Whereas the film is actually about something. It seemed to have the gravitas that played off the comedy.

DENNIS: The quest for the Grail is what the film is about, in essence.

TERRY: Yes. For example, in the “bring out your dead” sequence in the film, you can feel it within its context. You see this sort of gruesome, horrible dead cart.  It’s playing with our concepts of the middle ages and of death. The humor comes out of that blackness. You feel the undertow of blackness. Whereas, in the stage musical, it being a musical on Broadway, it’s just a funny number, and the scene is just a funny intro to a funny song. So, you kind of miss the dimension, I feel…and that’s why I think it isn’t “Python.”

DENNIS: But isn’t it the nature of art to allow for things to evolve?

TERRY: I agree. And that’s why I think the best parts of the musical are the new things. For instance, when they do the Andrew Lloyd Weber take-off and this girl comes in and sings “Whatever Happened To My Part” since she hasn’t appeared since the opening number and she’s really furious! That is one of the great moments where the show really comes alive for me.

Terry Jones's new book “Who Murdered Chaucer?” is available from St. Martins Press. “Terry Jones’s War on the War on Terror” is available from Nation Books. Dennis Daniel is a writer/producer and host of “The Album Rock Show” Saturdays, 10AM to 2PM on 98.5FM, The Bone. Email: dendan21@yahoo.com