The Night Monty Python Bombed on ‘The Tonight Show’

These days, Monty Python is considered “The Beatles of Comedy,” presumably because of the quality of their work, their Britishness and the fact that they won’t stop fighting over money now that the group’s broken up. 

But as hard as it may be to believe, there was a time when the Pythons had to sell themselves to America. While Monty Python’s Flying Circus was already a hit in the U.K. and Canada, the show didn’t air on U.S. public broadcasters until 1974. They did still have some American fans, thanks to the film And Now For Something Completely Different and the Pythons’ album releases.

But in 1973, at the end of their first-ever Canadian tour, the Pythons, minus John Cleese, traveled to California in order to promote their albums to American audiences. In addition to posing for a Rolling Stone photo shoot with Annie Leibowitz, they were invited to appear on The Tonight Show. And it was a total disaster.

Unfortunately for the Pythons, Johnny Carson was off that night, so they were welcomed instead by guest host Joey Bishop. Since tapes of most non-Carson episodes of The Tonight Show were wiped by NBC, there’s no surviving footage of the Pythons’ first Tonight Show appearance. But according to the group’s U.S. publicist, Nancy Lewis, the segment began inauspiciously when Bishop introduced the Pythons by unenthusiastically stating, “This is a comedy group from England, and I hear they’re supposed to be funny.”

Lewis recalled that the Pythons then performed a sketch as their screeching “Pepperpots” characters (according to Eric Idle it was the “Mrs. Premise and Mrs Conclusion Visit Jean-Paul Sartre” sketch), but it didn’t go over well. 

The audience “sat there wondering what was going on,” Lewis explained. “I remember standing at the back of the audience, there was just a deadness. It was terrible. I was ready to slash my wrists!”

She also pointed out that a sketch like “Dead Parrot” would have gone over far better with the Tonight Show crowd, but they couldn’t do that one because Cleese had already gone home.

In 2015, Idle compared the reaction to their Tonight Show debut to the premiere of the fictional musical Springtime for Hitler. “It was like The Producers, the film. The whole audience, their jaws were open,” Idle told an audience at the Tribeca Film Festival. And while they were asked to perform for half an hour, they ended up doing “the 30 minutes in 15 minutes to no laughs whatsoever.”

But the Pythons were far from upset. “We ran out, there was a bit of green grass in Burbank, and we lay down and we laughed for about 15 minutes because it was the funniest thing ever,” Idle recounted. “In Canada, anything we said they were falling about (with) laughter — America, they didn’t know what on Earth we were talking about.”

During the same trip they also taped several segments for the late night variety show The Midnight Special, which clearly went much better.