Mel Brooks Thought That Monty Python Stole One of Their Most Famous Sketches From Him
A lot of comedy fans love both Mel Brooks and Monty Python, and would presumably be thrilled if they all got along splendidly. Unfortunately, one of the very first meetings between the Blazing Saddles director and a Python member didn’t go so well.
Back in 1987, Brooks met Michael Palin, while the latter was in Los Angeles making A Fish Called Wanda. At the same time, Palin was trying to hire Brooks’ wife Anne Bancroft to star in his film American Friends, which eventually came out in 1991 (with no Anne Bancroft). Palin ran into Brooks at the studio commissary, and they immediately got off on the wrong foot.
As Palin wrote in his diary at the time, Brooks was “chunky, rack-like, barrel chest, with a firm, no-nonsense light paunch.” He then grabbed Palin’s hand and shook it “probably five or six times.” Then he affably implied that Monty Python had stolen some of his jokes. “I forgive you guys everything,” Palin recalled Brooks saying. “I want you to know, you’re so good, I forgive you for all those ideas you used.”
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“Is he joking?” Palin thought to himself.
“Spanish Inquisition?” Brooks allegedly said, “digging knowingly.” A confused Palin later asked Christopher Guest (husband of his A Fish Called Wanda co-star Jamie Lee Curtis) about the encounter. “Chris Guest tells me that Brooks has an almost pathological inability to accept competition — it’s all a reduction of his own world,” Palin wrote.
As for the implication of joke-thievery, Brooks, of course, had a song-and-dance routine about the Spanish Inquisition in History of the World, Part 1.
And one of the Pythons’ defining sketches was also Spanish Inquisition-themed.
But they’re two very different comic premises. Brooks’ scene is just a lavish musical number set during the actual Spanish Inquisition. The Monty Python sketch mined laughs from the absurdity that Catholic Inquistiors would exist in modern day Britain and torture people with furniture padding. More to the point, the first “Spanish Inquisition” sketch appeared on Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1970, more than a decade before Brooks’ film was released. Is it possible that Brooks caught a rerun of the show, and somehow didn’t realize that it wasn’t brand new?
Incidentally, elsewhere in Palin’s diary, he described attending the premiere of History of the World, Part 1, and he wasn’t a fan to say the least. He called it “dreadful,” adding that it was “like a huge, expensive, grotesquely-inflated stand-up act. A nightclub act with elephantiasis.”
Years later, it was the Pythons’ turn to accuse Brooks of borrowing one of their ideas: Eric Idle claimed that he had first suggested to Brooks that he should turn The Producers into a stage musical (Brooks attested that the idea came from David Geffen).
So I guess it’s a tie?
