A Python like no other, late Terry Jones leaves lasting legacy

The Pythons — the living ones, anyway — can be funny about death. The point of this column is to say surrealists like these guys should be funny about death. Some of us could use the help.

“Two down, four to go,” tweeted John Cleese Wednesday, reacting with affection to the death of Terry Jones, maybe the least Pythonesque of the Monty Python comedy team, maybe the most.

Cleese’s kicker, referencing the death of Graham Chapman way back in 1989, was consistent with a man who has in his Twitter profile, “Yes, I am still alive, contrary to rumor.”

“HE WAS A VERY NAUGHTY BOY!!” tweeted Terry Gilliam, “and we miss you. (Jones) was someone totally consumed with life … a brilliant, constantly questioning, iconoclastic, righteously argumentative and angry but outrageously funny and generous and kind human being … and very often a complete pain. One could never hope for a better friend.”

Eric Idle, a man usually known for looking on the bright side of life, said that Jones’ death, following a lifetime of making people laugh, was “too sad if you knew him.” But if you didn’t? “You will always smile.”

Idle’s emotion, expressed with his typical concision, clearly flowed from the diagnosis of dementia that Jones received in 2015. This had been, then, a slow goodbye, achingly familiar to any family, be it of blood or not, who has been afflicted with that horror. The Pythons were all about the quickness of their minds, and one of their number had been losing his. Especially cruel, given that of all the Pythons, Jones was the most iconoclastic. He never allowed himself to be trapped in one genre, any single perception. He could slip away.

Jones wrote children’s books. He penned op ed articles. He wrote about Geoffrey Chaucer. He came up with all manner of TV shows from fictions to documentaries. Michael Palin was correct Wednesday when he called Jones on his Facebook page a “Renaissance comedian,” by which I think he meant that Jones used comedy as a kind of creative entree, not just into different forms, but genres. Ideas, too. And activism.

Jones directed films including “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.”

All the Pythons have to die, of course. But when a person has dementia, like Jones, it becomes harder to plan your own death. Your narrative has changed and old stories and legacies are in process of slipping away.

But I hope Cleese, Idle and the rest go out kicking and grinning — after about fifty more years, of course.