Monty Pythons Big Red Book

Product Information

While it's a lot longer than the first one (Monty Python's Big Red Book, which had a lot more tie-ins to the television series) the average quality seems a little lower this time around. Everything is still very pythonesque and there are still a few real screamers, but some articles or stories are just too lengthy and stop being funny long before they're done. Additionally some of them aren't just long, but also seem forced, making them a chore to get through.

One of the most original and groundbreaking humor classics of all time, the Papperbok was compiled for Methuen in the early 1970s by the young Monty Python team at the height of their surreal powers and was published on the heels of the improbable success of the Monty Python's Flying Circus television series. There would be other books, but none was as iconic. The Pythons went on to do adaptations of their films ( Holy Grail, Life of Brian, Meaning of Life), while rivals tried to imitate their success – the lamentable Goodies book was an object lesson in how not to do it. But for the most part, it was a case of ‘and now for something completely the same’, and by the time alternative comedy came along in the late 1970s the formula was definitely looking past-it. Only the Viz volumes in the 1980s and 90s managed to revive some of that early comedic punch (Michael Palin sent Viz a note of congratulation, saying, ‘Your organ has given me greater pleasure than my own’ 2). The Big Red Book is technically a TV tie-in and does contain material that appeared in the earlier episodes of Flying Circus, but there is more than enough original material to ensure it's not just repetition for those who have the script books. The entire team took the opportunity to use ideas which only worked in print and the results are worthy of the Python name. Eric Idle acted as editor and there's a lot of his wordy style although Palin's hand is clearly at work in a lot of places and Gilliam is given free reign to return to his comic book days as he provides the visual style. A similar level of meticulousness went into the Party Political Manifesto for The Silly Party, which came as an insert. Riffs on adverts were also a staple. ‘There was an ad for the Whizzo Chocolate Assortment,’ says Hepburn, ‘which was a pretty close parody of Cadbury’s advertising, except that these particular chocolates were made of steel bolts that spring out when you bit into them.’ Fake ads were nothing new – Mad magazine had made them a trademark – but rarely had they been done with such relish.Everyone always forgets the books. A lot of people forget the albums but everyone always forgets the books. I watched five hours of a documentary series about Monty Python on Netflix recently and it spoke about the shows and the movies a lot, touched on the live shows and very briefly mentioned the albums. But the books were ignored completely, which is a huge shame. The books were conceived partly as an attempt to make the TV show live longer in the public imagination. Monty Python’s Flying Circus had been on air since 1969, and was steadily garnering a cult following. The team – John Cleese, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam – had coalesced into a formidable comedy unit, and was redefining comedy via a multi-sketch formula mixing satire with surrealism. The question was how best to represent those sketches on paper, as a kind of souvenir, in an era before video, DVD and the easy access of a remote control. This brand new (rather old now, actually) Papperbok contains a wide selection of very silly things in the vein of good old Monty Python humour, which anyone who reads this bo(o)k should be quite familiar with from the Flying Circus (If you haven't seen the Flying Circus, shame on you! Go and do that first before considering the papperboks!). The Pythons' first book ingeniously captured the spirit of the series, while also playing with the parameters of a printed book. Despite the title, it has little in common with Chairman Mao's "Little Red Book" (or even with the color red). Postmodernism, you say? Sounds like the kind of thing that would have been mercilessly lampooned in the ‘philosophers’ football match’ sketch. But some learned writers have dated the emergence of this form of cultural collaging to exactly the period in which the Bok was taking shape. David Harvey, for example, in his famous study The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) pinpoints 1972 as the moment when a ‘sea-change’ began to occur ‘in cultural as well as social-economic practices’. The Pythons’ penchant for pastiching, parodying, collaging and re-contextualising (most evident in the Bok) could all fit nicely into this theory. But then again, if the Pythons were postmodern, does that mean the Goons were, too? As Mr Gumby might say: ‘My brain hurts.’

Katy Hepburn and Derek Birdsall’s work for the Python boks was featured in ‘Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design Since the Sixties’ at the Barbican, London. There were a lot of them being published at the time, and they were ripe for a bashing,’ says Hepburn. ‘Again, we wanted to be as accurate as possible, so a lot of time was spent on the cover, for example.’ (Which includes the teasers: ‘Short Story: The Deodorant, by Constance MacPseudonym’ and ‘Grand Competition: Win a Thousand Deodorants’, etc.) She continues: ‘Then inside, we commissioned Peter Brookes to do a semi-realistic illustration, to accompany a preposterous romantic story, so that the magazine would seem more authentic, and also so the book wouldn’t look too uniform, like it was all Terry’s work.’ The Pythons (under the editorial stewardship of Eric Idle) produced a few books tied in to their TV shows and films, pioneering this category of publication. Of all their releases ‘Brand New Papperbok’ is probably the most successful as it replicates much of the stylistic sabotage that the Pythons applied to other media. Just as they deconstructed the rules of sketch comedy TV, or as per ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ film’s conventions, with ‘...Papperbok’ the accepted form of a book is disruptedWhat did the books achieve? Any comedian will tell you that it’s not so much the content of the joke, but the way it’s told. If nothing else, Big Red Book and Brand New Bok showed that design could be a crucial part of creating that joy. Some of the references (Reginald Bosanquet, Arthur Negus) are dated or incomprehensible outside the UK but the energy and typographic somersaults speak for themselves. There’s a case to be made that the books are a damn sight more entertaining than videos of the old shows. Attention to detail became a matter of pride. ‘The closer the pastiche was to the real thing, the better the gag would work,’ says Hepburn. ‘We became interested in the tension between how something looked and what was being said.’ A good example was the Radio Times-style report on the ‘Upper Class Twit of the Year Race’. Idle remembers: ‘That was a case of slotting something into a context. On the TV show we’d used a documentary format; here, it was the Radio Times.’ Hepburn continues: ‘The typeface, layout and design were all as close as possible to the magazine, even down to the rather poorly produced photos.’ Brand New Bok and Papperbok went on to imitate the success of Monty Python’s Big Red Book and sold in their hundreds of thousands (publishers Methuen can’t say exactly how many because, they say, they’ve ‘ditched the files’). They marked a watershed in a sense, because Papperbok was published in the same year that the television show came off the air. Thereafter, Monty Python would make the transition from cult act to (bigger budget) movies, and becoming megastars in the States. By the time this transformation was complete, the word ‘postmodernism’ had come into common parlance, and the Bok had all but been forgotten. The Brand New Monty Python Bok was the second book to be published by the British comedy troupe Monty Python. [1] Edited by Eric Idle, it was published by Methuen Books in 1973 and contained more print-style comic pieces than their first effort, Monty Python's Big Red Book. Except for one item about holidays (travel agency sketch) everything in this book is original, with a few shout-outs to some of the better known sketches.