Monty Python: v.2: Just the Words: Vol 2 Book

The companion volume to Monty Python's Flying Circus: Just The Words, Vol 1, this picks up the baton and gives us the scripts from the end of the second series, through the whole of the third and the brief fourth. Received wisdom is that TV Python witnessed a certain decline in quality towards the end, but there's little evidence of that here, with such iconic sketches as Spam, Summarise Proust, the Cheese shop and Oscar Wilde. Eventhe final six shows, made without the input of Cleese, contain gems: the Most Awful Family in Britain ("Beans!") for instance, or "Poetry Reading(Ants)".It is true that some of the writing here is simply wacky, surreal in the sense that Salvador Dali isn't so funny; a fair amount is fairly ordinary BBC-sketch stuff. But there are gleaming moments of perfect comedy, if such a thing exists. The Hungarian with the dodgy phrase book starts as standard farce humour:Hungarian: (Cleese) I will not buy this record. It is scratched.Tobacconist: (Jones) Sorry?Hungarian: I will not buy this record. It is scratched.Tobacconist: No, no, no. This ... tobacconist's.Hungarian: Ah! I will not buy this tobacconist's. It is scratched.But it is the way the sketch continues, the spot-on weirdness of the subsequent mistranslated phrases--"my hovercraft is full of eels", "drop your panties Sir William I cannot wait till lunchtime"--that shows the genius of Python. It is the same precision of absurdity that puts the singing Vikings in the back of the otherwise straightforward Spam sketch; difficult to say which that is so funny, so right, but it is. This book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand how comedy works, as much as it is for Python fans. --Adam RobertsRead More