Terry Gilliam Used Christmas Cards to Land His Monty Python Gig

Monty Python isn’t exactly known for creating the most festive content, with the possible exception of the first five minutes of Life of Brian, and the “Christmas in Heaven” musical number that wraps up The Meaning of Life.

But, oddly enough, one Python member secured their role in the troupe by finding a creative use for an old holiday tradition. 

Back in 1968, Terry Gilliam was having trouble getting work. He had previously made photographic comic strips for a magazine called Help!, including one in which a horny John Cleese hits on his kid’s Barbie doll.

When Help! went under, Cleese told Gilliam to get in touch with the people making Do Not Adjust Your Set, a children’s comedy series featuring Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones, which had become a surprise hit with adults. Gilliam later wrote that he was only hired because producer Humphrey Barclay “took pity on me, being an amateur cartoonist who liked what he saw in my portfolio.”

At first, Gilliam was hired to draw caricatures for Barclay’s new panel show, We Have Ways of Making You Laugh. But once Gilliam began making cut-out animations, Idle invited him to work on Do Not Adjust Your Set. One of his earliest tasks was to come up with something for their Christmas special, Do Not Adjust Your Stocking, which included holiday sketches such as “Royal Father Christmas College” about a militaristic Santa school.

Gilliam eventually found inspiration in a London art gallery. “I went down to the Tate, and they’ve got a huge collection of Victorian Christmas cards,” Gilliam revealed in The Pythons’ Autobiography. “So I went through the collection and photocopied things and started moving them around. So the style just developed out of that rather than any planning being involved.”

The result was The Christmas Card, a nearly three-minute short in which vintage holiday card illustrations are transformed into surreal, violent, wildly unhinged comedy scenes.

Perhaps even more than any of his other early films, The Christmas Card anticipated Gilliam’s future Monty Python works. According to Terry Jones, it was The Christmas Card and another of Gilliam's animations, Beware of the Elephants, that led him to the realization that Gilliam’s involvement could solve a major problem. 

Not wanting to do a conventionally-structured sketch show, the late Jones once claimed that he was at his parents’ home when he came up with the notion that Gilliam’s animation, which he had described as “sort of stream-of-consciousness,” could tie what would become Monty Python’s Flying Circus together.

“I suddenly thought, ‘That’s what we could do: We can do what (Spike) Milligan’s done with breaking up the sketch format (in his show Q5) and just do a whole thing that’s stream-of-consciousness,” Jones recalled, “and Terry’s animation can go in and out and link things, and the whole show would just flow like that.”

Gilliam has confirmed that it was “Terry J who established the initial template for my contribution to the group that eventually became Monty Python,” adding that the others went along with the proposal because it allowed them to be “liberated from the dominion of the conventional punchline.”

So this holiday season, instead of throwing out your holiday cards on January 1st, maybe try turning them into wacky art projects instead.