How to Irritate People (1969)

Truly Dreadful Film

Sadly Over-hyped

It is a performances centric movie

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

This is a harmless mock documentary made just before the TV series "Monty Python's Flying Circus" debuted. It stars John Cleese, but Michael Palin and Graham Chapman are on hand as well as a few others. But, most importantly, this is not a Python production and the chemistry of the later television show is not evident here since it lacks many key actors/writers. Most will find the show mildly interesting at best or even a tad dull because it lacks the crazy humor and polish of later productions. Die-hard Python fans will fall into one of two camps--those who love the show but are reasonable people who can admit this is far from great and those who see EVERY production any Python member participates as pure gold (these are known as "the Kool-Aid Drinkers"). I love the Monty Python series having seen it innumerable times, but I just can't recommend this show unless you are really curious or really bored.

First of all, I hope it won't be considered an act flaming to say some of the reviewers here seem to want to shame anybody who might have an interest in the pre-history of Britain's comedic centerpiece, Monty Python's Flying Circus. As a forty-seven-year-old American I can assert that, in the late nineteen-sixties, re-packaged David Frost specials used to pop up on TV on my side of the Atlantic and I can well remember how riotous these little glimpses of British comedy seemed. David Frost must be the Kevin Bacon of mid-twentieth century British comedians, because Peter Sellers, Marty Feldman and, as is evidenced by this movie which shows his name prominently in its credits, Monty Python were all within six degrees of him. (Frost's comedic coup was his series of Nixon interviews, of course. Frost was the Western World's court jester.) In any case, this movie (which, from what I can tell, was either a TV special from the start or a collection of best bits from a series) has three members of what was about to become Monty Python. It also has Connie Booth, who, besides being John Cleese's wife, worked with him very closely on the scripts for FAWLTY TOWERS. What is historically interesting is the narration. Cleese appears before each skit, prefacing it in much the same way MAD Magazine prefaces each article. A year later, when Monty Python had its first episode, gone were the prefatory explanations. The prefaces made me realize how grounded in Baby-Boomer idealism Monty Python was. A skit Cleese says is about how irritating parents can be is really a pretty cold delineation of the alienation between the World War Two generation and its offspring. The grown children are so engrossed in watching TV they won't even look at the parents and the parents are so unable to appreciate their children's alienation that they act as if there's nothing drastically wrong. MONTY PYTHON splashed the fact that things were drastically wrong across the screen in every episode. Here, in a just barely pre-Python world (specifically, 1968) there is a certain bowing to TV conventions which highlights, for me, the sadness of a world in which World War Two was very much a living memory. HOW TO IRRITATE PEOPLE is one step removed from the "How Not To Be Seen" skit. The rage which informs Python is under the surface here. At least one of the skits here is performed unchanged in MONTY PYTHON (the job interview), at least one other is, for my money, as good as anything Python would do, but made a little more human because of its mood of genuine (if dark) camaraderie at the end (the airplane skit) and in all the skits I saw serious precursors of skits which would come later. Palin has all his shtick in place, Cleese has his delivery and Chapman is, if anything, livelier here than in Python. (I particularly like his actor-asking-star-of-show for a compliment.) This also shows me that, for all the energy, the members of Monty Python had powers of observation. Seen here more as actors than clowns, we see master comics building up to the height of the satire they are about to achieve.

Lets not forget what we are watching here. This is a Python like tv episode of early sketch comedy. For a present audience, yes, it has many gaps and holes with very little if no comedy. But don't forget, this was produced in 1968! Before Laugh In and seven years before SNL! For what Python was doing then, was not only genius what probably the funniest act on television to the date. So, before you act critical, think again. This is what motivated much of the sketch comedy we see on television today.

The show as a whole fell kind of flat. The acting seems a bit uninspired at times, and there isn't that Python-ish chemistry that later appeared.However, two sketches do stand out; the "Airline Pilots" sketch, where Chapman, Cleese, and Palin take turns abusing their passengers; the other being the "Management Training Course Interview" where Cleese gets Brooke-Taylor to perform some humiliating stunts.