and now for Something Completely the Same as Everything Else.

So I've been watching, somewhat faithfully (by which I mean within 24 hours of it airing) the new Monty Python documentary on IFC. And yes, it's a well made talking-head retrospective documentary talking about some incredibly interesting people, but I'm kind of sorry I'm watching it.

Backing up a bit. I love Python, but I'm by no means a fanatic about it. I doubt I've seen every single episode of the show, though maybe I have, and I've probably only seen Life of Brian 2 or 3 times. But I love Live at the Hollywood Bowl and of course the Holy Grail and I even like the Meaning of Life more than most people. And at one point, I was enough of a fan to watch Fawlty Towers.

But one of the things that struck me while watching this documentary is that I knew absolutely nothing about these guys. Ok, not entirely true, I knew Terry Gilliam was the lone American. I knew Graham Chapman was dead. But that was pretty much it. And I realize now that I preferred it that way.

I didn't want to know that Graham's coming out of the closet caused tension in the group, not that they disapproved but because they were so shocked at it, which Graham apparently took as disapproval. I didn't want to know that Eric Idle hardly ever wrote anything. I especially didn't want to know that, when battling with BBC censors, John Cleese occasionally sided with the censors against the group. Ok, sure, I do find it amusing that Cleese's father (or grandfather, I don't remember) changed the family name from "Cheese" to "Cleese." But I don't want to hear about how John and Terry (Jones) were frequently at odds, and made everyone else pick sides. And one of the stories Cleese told (about the parrot sketch) actually contradicts the legend of how it was created (he said it was based on a car salesman Michael used to know and they immediately knew it should be a dog or a parrot. The legend I'd always heard said it started out as a toaster, they couldn't get it right and Graham, who hadn't even been working on the sketch said "forget the toaster, make it a parrot")

In other words, I didn't want to know that Monty Pyton was a collection of human beings. My preferred vision for them was that they were beamed here from another plane of existence as a unit, given the ability to create this mystical blend of satire and slapstick, and were then immediately beamed back to their home world, leaving behind older versions of Cleese, Idle and Palin to do the occasional travel documentary or "A Fish Called Wanda."

I suppose I could try to make some larger point about how back in the day we didn't need to know every little obsessive detail about celebrities, and how they go to Starbucks Just Like Us. But I think this is more of a one-off situation. I actually like knowing that Keifer Sutherland is so self-conscious about his height that they only cast people who are 5' 8" or shorter on 24. Or that Stephen Colbert doesn' let his kids watch his show because he doesn't want them to think he's really like that guy on TV. Python was different, and they should stay that way. I think I'm going to delete the rest of the documentary and just watch Grail again.