Monty Python

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Black Comedies

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[The members of Monty Python's Flying Circus are] precocious adolescents. "Another Monty Python Record" offers up a dash of cannibalism and a moment in which Pablo Casals plays Bach while plunging hundreds of feet into a bucket of hot fat. It is all very civilized lunacy, however. For example, on World Forum, none other than Lenin, Marx, Ché Guevara, and Mao Tse-tung engage in the typical inane games-show competition. During this disc the listener is constantly being reminded that he is listening to a phonograph record, an unusual use of a typical Brechtian device…. For all their seeming cleverness though, Monty Python's Flying Circus members are just another bunch of aging college cut-ups, creating the kind of material that is just far out enough to make the unknowing feel truly sophisticated. (p. 77)

Henry Edwards, "Black Comedies," in High Fidelity (copyright © by ABC Leisure Magazine, Inc.; all rights reserved; excerpted by permission), Vol. 23, No. 1, January, 1973. pp. 76-7.∗

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