How to Irritate People (1969)

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Fresh and Exciting

The acting in this movie is really good.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

I bought this recently on VHS at a Half-Price bookstore and, man, does it really blow you away with it's insane humor. It is so hilarious and truly creative all at the same time. The title basically speaks for itself. John Cleese hosts and appears in the sketches along with regular Python members Chapman, Palin and his wife/co-star Connie Booth. I've seen it at least three time and now want to see it again sometime next month.The only reason I give it eight out of ten stars is because it does go over a little too long, but that's forgivable due to it's overall excellent comedic value.

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.

Here's an oddity - made the year before Python with most of the cast and the assorted Goodie. Truth be told it's not all that funny, and features an extremely offensive scene with Palin as an Indian waiter, but there are moments of interest, such as seeing an extended range of Cleese's acting abilities, the extremely funny airline sketch, and noting how Connie Booth hardly aged between this and Fawlty Towers...

This show seems to have been aimed at a more conventional crowd than Cleese, Chapman and Palin's work with Monty Python. In fact, it has very, very little of the subversive and hilarious wit they displayed in that comedy troupe. The premise doesn't give much room for anything but Cleese portraying an intentionally annoying character (a noisy father disrupting his TV-watching children, an overly considerate date, a loud middle-aged woman in a movie theater) and noticeably bothering a character usually portrayed by Michael Palin. The characters don't have anything very funny about them, they are very straighforward and do nothing but annoy or get annoyed in the exact way you would expect based on Cleese's narrated set-up. There aren't any twists. There are very few moments when you get any hint of how brilliant these guys could be on their television shows and movies as Monty Python. In fact, it's kind of annoying seeing such talented men wasting away in such an unfunny piece of work - even if you're a Python fan, theres nothing really necessary about 'How To Irritate People', though the dedicated will inevitably check it out since theres almost always a copy by the Flying Circus videos at any rental store.