Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Terry Jones (1942-2019)
Terry Jones of Mony Python's Flying Circus has passed away at the age of 77. If the Pythons were the Beatles of comedy (and they were), then Mr. Jones was the George Harrison of the group -- a little reserved, probably the smartest, and the one who most desired control of his own work. He had interests that extended well beyong making people laugh, and were it not for Python, he would be mourned as one his generations greatest medievalists. But Python did happen, and the rest is history.
His friend Sir Michael Palin stated, "He was far more than one of the funniest writer-performers of his generation, he was the complete Renaissance comedian -- writer, director, presenter, historian, brilliant children's author, and the warmest, most wonderful company you could wish to have."
Fans of Mr. Jones need only a few words to recall particular pieces of his work, almost they way poets are recalled. Mr. Creosote. "He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy." Karl Marx loses the grand prize. The naked organist. The Spanish Inquisition. Nudge-nudge. The fish-slapping dance.
Mr. Jones quickly became the director of the Python films, along with Terry Gilliam for a time. The reason was quality control. He knew how he wanted a piece to look, and unless he was in the director's chair, it was unlikely to happen the way he wanted it to happen. "You not only act in the things -- you've got to actually start directing the things as well. When we were doing Python the TV show, I was a real pain in the neck."
But there was a reason for this. "My big hero is Buster Keaton because he made comedy look beautiful," Mr. Jones told David Morgan for the book Monty Python Speaks! "He didn't say, 'Oh it's comedy, so we don't need to bother about the way it looks.' The way it looks is crucial, particularly because we were doing silly stuff. It has to have an integrity to it."
As a medievalist, he wrote Chaucer's Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary in 1980. A reviewer for the Economist called Mr. Jones a "historian of impressive competence." For television, he created and starred in three different historical series: Crusades (1995), Medieval Lives (2004) and Barbarians (2006).
He was an avid protester against the Bush-Blair war in Iraq. He told Mother Jones "You saw two million people taking the streets of London to protest against this and say 'don't do it,' and Blair just goes ahead. He prepares this dodgy dossier, which is full of manipulated intelligence in order to persuade people that it's a reasonable thing to invade Iraq. And yet by doing that action, instead of making us safer from terror attacks, he's actually putting us on the front line. So I think we feel exposed and we feel vulnerable because of these actions that our leaders are taking with total disregard for the safety of their own people."
In the end, however, he made people laugh and never took himself too seriously. "The one thing we all agreed on, our chief aim, was to be totally unpredictable and never to repeat ourselves," he said in talking about the Python days. "We wanted to be unquantifiable. That 'pythonesque' is now an adjective in the O.E.D. means we failed utterly." The world needs more such failures.
© Copyright 2020 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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