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Article: Off to the flying circus: comedy's new stars silly-walk in the footsteps of Monty Python.(the influence of 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' television program on younger comedians and television comedy writers)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- U.S. News & World Report
- Article date:
- March 23, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 All rights reserved. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Comedy's new stars silly-walk in the footsteps of Monty Python When comedians David Cross and Bob Odenkirk were pitching their sketch series Mr. Show to officials at HBO, they shamelessly cribbed an idea from Monty Python, the legendary British comedy troupe. "HBO couldn't understand what we were trying to do. We wanted to mix stage sketches with pretaped pieces and show them all in front of a live audience," recalls Odenkirk, a former Saturday Night Live writer. "A lot of people didn't realize Python had a live audience. So we handed them this page from Kim Howard Johnson's book The First 200 Years of Monty Python to convince them."
Cross and Odenkirk were among the ...