John Cleese Honors Graham Chapman With A Throwback to His Best-Ever Eulogy
It’s been 35 years and three days since Monty Python star Graham Chapman passed away from complications related to cancer, but John Cleese hasn’t forgotten how good he roasted the late legend at the memorial service.
When Monty Python’s resident leading man left this world on October 4, 1989, he left a hole in the world of absurdist comedy that hasn’t been filled to this day. Between his sketch work on Monty Python and the Flying Circus and his monumental performances as the main characters of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Chapman achieved a level of comedic immortality in which his work is still constantly quoted, discussed and appraised as some of the finest artistry in the history of humor in film. As such, when the credits rolled on the Pythons’ cheeky, openly gay and iconically irreverent lead actor, it didn’t seem right to treat the occasion with the typical solemnity with which the English usually hold for their recently deceased.
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Two months after Chapman’s passing, the five remaining members of Monty Python honored their old friend and collaborator at a public memorial service in St. Bartholomew’s Church in London, a televised event that’s still the funniest faux-funeral in the history of comedy. On Friday, John Cleese took a short break from beefing with the surviving members of Monty Python to remember the time he made British TV history on Chapman’s behalf:
As the story goes, Monty Python decided to turn Chapman’s public memorial into their last proper group project because they wanted to protect the private funeral, attended only by Chapman’s family and closest loved ones, from turning into a massive media event. In lieu of attracting the paparazzi, Cleese and his companions sent a wreath in the shape of the Python foot to the funeral service along with the message, “To Graham from the other Pythons with all our love. P.S.: Stop us if we’re getting too silly.”
And, in case the send-off that Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin and the Terrys gave their old mate was too tasteful, the jokes about Chapman’s death didn’t stop there — when they reunited at The U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in 1998, the five remaining Pythons brought out an English butler holding an urn that supposedly contained Chapman’s cremated remains, only for the butler to “accidentally” spill Chapman all over the stage. They reclaimed him with a Dustbuster.
Always look on the bright side of death, I guess.
