Now For Something Completely Different: The Pythons Brought It 50 Years Ago This Month

“Do you realize,” John Cleese once said to Michael Palin, “we could be the first people in history to do a whole comedy show to complete silence?” Palin responded, “I was thinking exactly the same thing.”

The two were about to start filming, before a live audience, the first episode of 1969’s new BBC series ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’.

The name was non-sensical. The show was more so. It was, from top to bottom, a logical but absurd extension of the off-the-wall comedy exemplified in then-recent years by the likes of ‘The Goon Show’, ‘Beyond The Fringe’ and a couple of others. The Pythons, students all of all those shows, essentially threw all their models out the window and started from scratch.

The skits they created, some a few minutes long, others much longer (and a few, such as ‘The Department of Silly Walks’, serialized over their four-year run), flitted, as it were, from a brain storm through a thunder event and on to a hurricane. They were mad and fast-paced as The Marx Brothers and as well-crafted as any comedy performers ever. Their collective name, Monty Python, “doesn’t mean anything,” Mentalfloss says — but its origins does exemplify how the troupe came to quickly spell ‘trouble’ for comedians unprepared to acknowledge that the late…