Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers by Mike Sacks Read Free Book Online Page A

with the censors. We wrote a sketch [for the third series] called “The All-England Summarize Proust Competition.” It was about a beauty pageant where contestants, instead of impressing judges with singing or flute playing, would attempt to summarize the works and philosophy of Proust. And this was one of the first instances, if not the very first time, that the word “masturbation” was ever used on television. Graham [Chapman] was playing a contestant. The host of the pageant, played by me, asked Graham what his hobbies were, and he said, “Well, strangling animals, golf, and masturbation.”
    The BBC edited out “masturbation.” Keep in mind, the BBC was okay with strangling cats. But masturbation was definitely out. [Laughs] If you watch the edited sketch, there’s a lag time after Graham says “golf.” His lips move but you can’t hear him say “masturbation.” And then there’s a huge laugh from the live audience. But this is puzzling to the home viewers. It sounds like the studio audience is laughing at “strangling animals.” It becomes even stranger.
    Would Python overwrite? For instance, I’ve heard that the original script for The Holy Grail was much longer, and that only about 10 percent of the first draft appears in the movie.
    Yes, we’d usually write a lot of material, or at least pitch material, and then cut down. The first draft of
Holy Grail
was much longer. The first half took place in the present day. Arthur and the rest of the knights found that the Holy Grail was being sold at Harrods [department store, in London]. You could find
anything
there. But we ultimately decided to have the entire film only take place in the Middle Ages.
    For
Life of Brian
, we had a few scenes that were cut. One of the original ideas was for it to be the story of the thirteenth apostle who missed the last supper because his wife had invited friends over to eat back at their house. That was changed. We spent a lot of time on rewrites. Not so much for
Meaning of Life
, but certainly for the first two films.
    We were talking earlier about how comedy is often created by bringing disparate ideas together. You wrote a scene for The Meaning of Life that might just be one of the strangest scenes in the history of film—at least for a comedy. I’m thinking of the Mr. Creosote scene, played by you (in what I would assume, and truly hope, was heavy makeup). A gigantic man, dining in a very fancy restaurant, vomits until he explodes.
    [Laughs] Well, for that one, I just sat down and wrote a sketch in the worst possible taste. In fact, at the top of the paper it read: “Sketch in the Worst Possible Taste.” The first time I ever read that in front of the rest of Python, we had just eaten lunch. No one liked it. That was
not
the time to do it. It was decisively rejected. But then a month later John [Cleese] rang me up and said, “I’m going to change my mind about this.” I think he spotted that the waiter could be very funny. It was John who came up with the “wafer thin” line and to offer the mint to Mr. Creosote just before he explodes. That’s the only sketch I ever co-wrote with John.
    The Mr. Creosote scene took four days to shoot. On the fifth day, a wedding took place in the ballroom where we shot it. That wasn’t a set! The fake vomit was Russian salad dressing, and some other food ingredients. By the fifth day you can imagine the smell. And the poor people getting married had to come into that stench. Not a good way to start off the married life.
    Fellow Python Eric Idle has called The Meaning of Life a “kind of a punk film.” Do you agree with that?
    I think so. I think that might be accurate. But it was really no different from how we always wrote. We weren’t concerned with making anyone but ourselves laugh. And that’s clear in the Mr. Creosote sketch. I mean, we certainly weren’t pandering with that sketch.
    Nor with the “Fishy, Fishy” sketch, also in The Meaning of Life . The sketch