Commentary: 'Monty Python' comedian Eric Idle's anarchic humor heads for the Huntington Library archives
You can see it on television, you can watch it online, you can even find it in the Oxford English Dictionary, as a compound adjective - "Monty Pythonesque," meaning possessing the surreal comedy of the BBC sketch show "Monty Python's Flying Circus." It was created a half-century ago by a half-dozen amusingly off-kilter wits and humorists who then made "Python" a brand in film as well as television.
One of them, Eric Idle, has to his credit novels and nonfiction and, perhaps most splendidly, the musical "Spamalot," a Tony-winning Arthurian sendup, which is, as they say, soon to be a major motion picture. Soon - really.
Idle lives in Los Angeles, and after one particular tour of the Huntington Library in San Marino, he was invited to make his 50-plus years of notes, scripts, librettos, letters, scores and to-do lists a part of the Huntington's archives. Here he explains how it happened, and why, and a few other subjects that are completely different.
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Q: "Donating one's papers" sounds very grand. How did this happen?
It happened because my wife and I sponsor something called the Idle Scholar, which brings somebody out from Pembroke College, Cambridge, to (fellow Python Terry) Gilliam's college, Occidental, for the three months at the United Nations where they're interning.
In the first year, we took the winner, a young lady, to the Huntington, and it was lovely. Then they showed us around the library, because we were all very interested in the new modern library
