jindiggots

funny, pictures, Portland, sad, true 1 Comment »

When I was in high school, my brother and I were lucky enough to get to see Monty Python’s Graham Chapman in a very rare live performance.  It was 1986, and he appeared at the Masonic Temple (now the new wing of the Art Museum) here in Portland.  We begged our dad to let us go, and he somewhat reluctantly agreed.  I think he knew how obsessed we were with Monty Python, and that this was quite probably a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see even one of them in person.

I still have my ticket stub floating around here somewhere.  It always turns up when I’m not looking for it, but it disappears again on the rare occasions that I need it.  I realize that this entry would be slightly more compelling if I could provide photographic proof, but for now, you’ll just have to take my word that I still have it.

That night at the dinner table, Dad gave us his equivalent of a warning.  “Now, British comedy tends to be a bit. . .blue, so they may say things that you guys aren’t used to hearing, and make some crude jokes.”

“Yeah, Dad, we know what to expect.  We’ve watched Monty Python for years, and they’re definitely not ‘blue’ or whatever.”

“Is there an opening act?”

“Yes.”

The present-day version of me will now step in and tell you that there was indeed an opening act, but we’d never heard of them, either before or since.  They were quite terrible.  In fact, I can remember only one line of their boring sketch comedy routines:   someone yelling, in a mock-drunken stupor, “Start the fuckin’ car!“  Oh, the hilarity.

“Well,” Dad continued, “I’m sure you guys will be fine, but don’t be too surprised if blah blah blue blah blah—“  I don’t even remember the rest of what he said, actually.  I was much too excited to finish dinner and get downtown.

Dad drove us to the Masonic Temple and dropped us off by the door.  We waited in line, everyone buzzing with excitement, until the doors finally opened and the line of people was let in.  It was the first live comedy show we’d ever seen, and we expected to see Graham peeking out from behind a curtain or, if we were really lucky, sitting on one of the metal folding chairs in the audience somewhere.  We kept glancing around the room, hoping for a sighting.  The opening act came out and did their thing, and like I said, they were terrible.  The audience dutifully clapped, and some people even laughed a bit, but we thought it seemed like a mistake to have an opening act for a colossus like Graham Chapman.  Anyone coming between us and him was an unwelcome distraction.

After what seemed like forty-five minutes (because it probably was) of torturous comedy, Graham came out on stage.  He received a thunderous standing ovation before he settled into his part of the show.  It wasn’t a comedy performance, as such.  He mostly told stories, some of which were funny and some of which were not.  He talked about his new Dangerous Sports Club, which involved lots of skydiving and things, and warranted a longish slide show.  (I think Douglas Adams was in the DSC as well; I seem to recall him being in a picture or two in the slide show.)  Graham talked quite a bit about Monty Python, obviously, and told us a great story about how during the final season of Flying Circus, the censors started to suspect that one of the members was homosexual.  One of them was, of course, and it was Graham, although he was still publicly in the closet at the time.  But when the Pythons kept getting letters from the BBC saying You Guys Really Need To Do Something About This Homosexual Problem, it all came down at the exact same time that John Cleese decided to leave the group.  The remaining members took the funny opportunity to write to the BBC:  “Thank you for bringing this to our attention.  We have discovered the offending member, and he has since been sacked.”

My favorite moment of the show, however, was during the question-and-answer session near the end of the evening.  Most of the questions were the usual variety of softballs like, “Do you miss being in Monty Python?” or “How hard is it to get into comedy?”, but one guy stood up and asked, “What’s a jindiggot?

“A what?”

“A jindiggot.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

“But you said it.”

“Er, I don’t. . .think I did.”  Graham was gamely trying to answer the guy, but by this time, everyone was looking at each other in a what-in-the-world-is-this-guy-talking-about way.  We all turned and looked at him as he started to really get nervous.

“Yeah, you did.  It was in The Holy Grail. . .the scene with the French guy yelling insults at King Arthur from the top of the castle.  You said, ‘You and all your silly English jindiggots.’ ”

At that point, everyone realized what he was talking about, and we all burst into peals of laughter.  The French knight couldn’t pronounce the word ‘knights’, so it sounded like ‘ken-NIG-ots.”  This guy had misheard the line and wondered for years what a ‘jindiggot’ was.  Now Graham was performing in HIS town, and answering HIS question, which must have seemed like the most amazing opportunity in history.

“Um,” Graham said diplomatically, “there seems to be a slight misunderstanding.”  The audience was howling by now, as Graham had to good-naturedly explain the joke that everyone else in the world knew so well.  Furthermore, it was John Cleese who had spoken the line, not Graham.  Graham was King Arthur, standing at the base of the castle and the opposite end of the conversation, being taunted by Cleese’s French knight.  As the audience continued to laugh, the guy realized his mistakes and slunk low in his seat, presumably praying for a quick (and hopefully invisible) death.  That was definitely the highlight of the night, and no one had any further questions, so Graham took the opportunity to wrap up the show.  He thanked us and walked off to another thunderous standing ovation, after which he came bounding across the stage like a rabbit, with his fingers raised next to his head like rabbit ears.

I don’t think anyone knew yet that Graham had cancer.  When he died three years later, there were rumors of AIDS, but they proved to be unfounded.  The world was stunned; he wasn’t even fifty years old.  The other Pythons are all still alive and presumably well, but I’m pretty sure they’ve never been to Portland.  It was a huge honor to have been able to see him here, and I certainly won’t forget it.

R.I.P., Graham.  Happy Monty Python Day.

 

 

Monty Python Day

beautiful, funny, pictures, true No Comments »

It’s safe to say that I have been a Monty Python fanatic for most of my life, starting when I was about thirteen years old.  My brother and I, when we used to visit Dad, had a tiny black-and-white television in the bedroom we shared.  Dad would say goodnight to us and head upstairs to bed, and he expected us to do the same.  What he didn’t know, however, was that at eleven-thirty Monty Python’s Flying Circus came on, and so did other similar British ‘programmes’ like Doctor Who and The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  We watched these shows at an almost but not entirely inaudible volume level, and parked ourselves on the floor, about a foot away from the tiny monochromatic screen.

When we were at Mom’s house in Yakima, which was the majority of the time, Flying Circus wasn’t available on TV there, so we went into a kind of withdrawal.  We rented the videos about a hundred million times, and I even made audio cassettes of the movies by laboriously holding a microphone up to the TV speaker so that I could constantly listen and memorize the dialogue between our viewings of the movies.  I was obsessed.

My obsession seemed only to get stronger and stronger, and it lasted well into my college years.  I would inject Monty Python quotations into pretty much every conversation, and since their range is so broad, it’s surprisingly easy to find quotes that are apropos to a myriad of subjects.  I used to pride myself on my knowledge of their trivia, and I was just enough of an a-hole that if someone dared make the egregious mistake of misquoting the Masters, I would actually correct the person.  The most commonly misquoted line I’ve encountered is one from the Black Knight scene in that movie about the search for a grail.  The Knight gets his arms and legs chopped off by King Arthur, but his fearlessly vigilant head and torso are still attempting to stop Arthur from crossing the bridge the Knight is guarding.

Despite massive blood loss and a complete lack of appendages, the indomitable Knight continues to hurl insults at King Arthur as Arthur and his servant walk across the hilariously puny bridge and go along their merry way.  “You yellow bastards,” the Knight yells over his shoulder.  “Come back and take what’s coming to you!  I’ll bite your legs off!“  The line, “I’ll bite your legs off” has somehow found its way into the public vernacular as, “I’ll cut your head off,” which A) doesn’t make sense, and B) isn’t funny.  That kind of thing used to drive me crazy, and I never hesitated to correct the offender.

All through high school and college, I had the reputation of being the Monty Python expert in my little social circle, but after a while, that kind of thing tends to get on peoples’ nerves.  I remember a couple of friends telling me in no uncertain terms that for once they would like to have a Python-free conversation.  If you’ve ever seen the movie Sliding Doors (and you should, it’s excellent), you may remember the fast-talking, witty Scottish guy Gwyneth Paltrow falls for.   He’s an obsessive MP quoter too, and there’s one scene in which he and she are at a dinner party, which he becomes the life of by quoting a huge chunk of the entire Spanish Inquisition scene, verbatim.  I couldn’t find the Sliding Doors clip, but I think a picture of the Inquisition will be enough to jog your memory.

So the guy is sitting there at the table quoting the entire scene.   Everyone is at rapt attention, hanging on his every word, laughing uproariously at the salient points.   I’ve been That Guy, and I’m here to tell you that real life doesn’t work that way.  People start to get annoyed if all you do is quote things, or if you don’t have anything of your own to add to a conversation.  They’ll quickly tire of talking with you and go talk with other people instead.  Funny how that works. . .and how long it took me to realize it.

There was a subsequent time in my life when I went through a rigorous training program I called (in my head, anyway) How To Be A Better Human.  Many people have had similar experiences; that sort of thing is one of the rites of passage toward being an adult.  I went through and found some of the areas of my life that weren’t working; there were quite a few at the time, I can assure you.  I’ll spare you the details for another time, but one of the habits I decided to break was the constant quoting of Monty Python.  I made a pact with myself that I would never do it again, since I had spent so many years doing it.  As a corollary, if I heard someone misquote a line or two, I was prepared to let that slide.  Life’s too short for that kind of pedantry.

Fast forward about fifteen years, and along comes Monty Python Day.  Everyone on Facebook is quoting and having a good time, and it IS fun.  But when I chime in (and I DO chime in!), I have to admit that I have slightly mixed feelings about doing it, because it means I’m breaking my pact.  I suppose after this many years of good behavior, I can ease up a little bit and just enjoy it.  Who among us doesn’t like levity?

As proof of my love of levity, I’m embedding one of my favorite episodes:  the one with the Lifeboat/Cannibalism/Undertaker sketches in it.  My all-time favorite Python animation sequence is the ‘Cannibalism’ section in this clip, starting around the 3:40 mark.

All this being said, there will always be a special place in my heart (and probably my DNA, too, quite frankly) for the Pythons. They unwittingly played a huge part in the formation of my personality, and I owe them a great debt of gratitude. I “always look on the bright side of life” because of them.

There I go, breaking my pact.  Oh well.  No use biting my legs off about it.

World Accordion Day

music, pictures 1 Comment »

I just found out that today is World Accordion Day, which means that I’d be remiss if I didn’t share some pictures of my contribution to the cause.

 

the pillow incident

beautiful, funny, pictures, true, Washington No Comments »

The first part of this entry is kind of gross; I’m not gonna lie about that.  The good news is that it’s also really funny, and it’s about a joke I played on my brother when I was about fifteen years old.

We shared a big bedroom at Dad’s house.  One day, Brother was lying on his bed doing homework, and I was lying on my own bed reading a book.  He got up to take a break, or watch TV or something, and at the same time I got the urge to pass gas.  Being the older brother, it was my natural impulse to walk over and pass gas into his pillow.   I repeated that action as the need arose, and I thought it would be even funnier if I was able to really stink up his pillow as much as possible, so I took my shoes off and rubbed my smelly socks all over it, inside and out.

A few minutes later, Brother walked back into the room, and I was reading on my bed, as if nothing had changed.  He reclined on his bed, with one elbow on the offending pillow, and returned to his studies.  After a few minutes, he sniffed the air and said, “Do you smell something?  It smells weird over here.”

“Hunh,” I said, as casually as possible.  “I don’t notice anything.  Smells fine here.”  My bed was ten feet away from his.

He turned back to his books for a while, but then curiosity got the better of him again.  “No, really,” he said.  “Are you sure you don’t smell anything?  It’s pretty bad.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, shrugging my shoulder.  “I don’t smell anything weird at all.”

He turned back, determined to find the source of the odor.  He sniffed up and down, then got a really strange look on his face as he looked toward his pillow.  That was the moment I’d been waiting for.  As he brought his nose closer and closer, the realization hit him, and I burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter.

Gross! What the heck did you do?” he asked, as he pulled off the pillowcase, smelled the pillow itself, and grimaced.

I was still laughing, but I finally pulled myself together enough to give him an answer.  “I might have farted on it a few times.  And I also might have slipped and accidentally rubbed my socks all over it too.  Yeah. . .I might’ve done that.”  I started laughing again.  He did too, as I recall.

A few years ago, I told a girl I was dating about The Pillow Incident, and she was slightly repulsed by it.  She saw the humor, but she also never quite believed that I wouldn’t do that sort of thing again.   I assured her that I wouldn’t, since I was thirty four years old, and she of all people had nothing to worry about.

Why am I telling that story now?  I’m not sure, exactly, but it came up in conversation with a friend the other day, so it had been bopping around in my brain lately, and I figured that I should tell it here too, under the heading of Childhood Stories.  I did learn that I shouldn’t tell that one when I’m on a date.  Not a very sexy story, as it turns out.  Ha ha.

One other funny childhood story (this one’s not gross, don’t worry) that took place in that bedroom was when my brother and I were wrestling one day, and it kept escalating and escalating, like it does sometimes between brothers.  We were joking around, pulling clothes and stuff out of each others’ dressers, and pretty soon we started pulling the blankets off of each others’ beds too.  It was all in fun, as if to say, “So, you wanna start something?  Okay, well, how about THIS?”  We kept one-upping each other, until all of our clothes, blankets, sheets, and mattress pads were strewn around the floor of the big bedroom.  We were laughing like hyenas, and my brother reached for my actual mattress and started to pull it from my bed frame.

That’s when Dad walked in.  He heard the commotion and came over to see what was going on.  His jaw dropped.  “What the hell are you guys doing?” he yelled.  “Clean this crap up now!”  His tone of voice broke the spell of our laughter, and we looked up, somewhat mortified, to see that we had completely destroyed the room.  Our beds were in a gigantic heap in the middle of the floor, and it looked as if a tornado had touched down in our room, but had spared the rest of the house.  He stood and watched us incredulously as we put everything back together.

That house was really great.  It was owned by family friends who went to our church.  Their aging mother lived in the house for decades, and our friends lived in the house up the hill.  She was in her eighties, and was starting to be unable to live alone anymore.  They wanted someone to live in her house, but they wanted it to be someone they knew.  It was a perfect situation.  They kept the rent low for us, and we happily moved in.

The house is over a hundred years old now, and it used to be the only house on the street.  It’s situated on the old Evergreen Highway in Vancouver, which runs right along the Columbia river.  We used to be able to walk down to the waterfront and play down there.  These days, all of the roads are private, and gated, and so far I’ve been unable to find a way down past the railroad tracks to the river.   Our old house is now surrounded by a group of newly built houses, and the wild, wooded hillside is now a sleepy cul-de-sac like a million others.

Such is the way in America, I suppose.  Open spaces don’t last long, particularly in Portland, where the Urban Growth Boundary is strictly enforced, and space is at a premium.  Vancouver doesn’t have a law like that, so urban sprawl is the order of the day, but this house is in a long-developed residential neighborhood, and we felt lucky to have had the opportunity to live there.

It’s probably worth mentioning that our bedroom at the time of these stories was in the bedroom on the back of the house, on the far left side of the picture.  The layout of the house changed sometimes, too, because at another point, we lived in the upstairs room and could look out over the river and the airport.  We even bought an airport radio and would sit up there for hours with binoculars and a notepad, writing down the names and flight numbers of the planes as they landed and took off.

If you’d told me when I started this entry that it would morph from a disgusting tale of pillow desecration into a nostalgic musing, I might not have believed you.  Yet here we are, and I stand by my choices.  For the record, I solemnly swear not to soil any more pillows, and I won’t tell that story on any more dates.  In fact, if I’m on a date, and you hear me start to launch into it, I hereby give you permission to step in and save me from myself.

 

an F-bomb joke

funny, pictures No Comments »

In the interest of creating more levity, I’d like to share a little joke with you.

McCartney: Knock, knock.

Lennon: Who’s there?

McCartney: Fuck.

Lennon: Fuck who?

McCartney: No. . .fuck WHOM.

Ha ha. I should, of course, mention that I didn’t invent that particular joke. I did, however, choose the names of the characters involved, and I chose the picture and the following interesting video for this blog entry.