MONTY SNAKE

MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS
1969-1974 BBC

THE TAIL OF MONTY SNAKE
National Lampoon #72, March 1976
a: Randall Enos

I'm sure anyone familiar with any of these magazines or just any late 20th century comedy is also quite familiar with Monty Python, so I need not give much background about them. Here's a curiosity from National Lampoon's second phase. I like to think there were several different phases of the magazine. The first five years was with the original staff that helped create the counterculture/nostalgia aesthetic that they continued where MAD left off, and has carried on in comedy that exists today. After that and before Animal House, they had no idea what direction they wanted to go, no two issues looked alike, and there was no coherent art direction. Then after Animal House, they got their groove back except they had a conservative/libertarian streak, punching down rather than up, and becoming increasingly more misogynistic (downright hostile to women on staff from some stories I've heard). In the eighties they started to rely on nude photos to sell the magazine and you could tell the staff didn't even care anymore, anyone new using it as a stepping stone to write for television. Eventually the publisher decided he could do it himself and had his sons take over, a combination of Elon Musk at Twitter and the Trump Kids. By the time a new company tried to revive it in the nineties it was too late.

But why and how parody something that was already way beyond parody? I think it's more bitterness and jealousy than anything else. Like I said, this was around the magazine's second phase. By then most of the original staff either went on to other projects or counted money from their buyout. Many of National Lampoon's writers had gone to write for Saturday Night Live and those still at the magazine believed it was stealing their thunder. If you look at issues from around this time there are a lot of sour grapes digs at the show. Also around this time Monty Python's Flying Circus was starting to show in the United States and was becoming the hip new thing in comedy that they once were, and television was a more popular and lucrative medium than print. And Lampoon editor Tony Hendra, once a sketch comic, claimed Monty Python stole a bit from him.

Though the troupe was made up of six people—John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam, many of their fans thought there was a person named 'Monty Python'.