I WAKE UP THIS MORNING EXCITED. NO DOUBT ABOUT IT, THERE IS THAT ICY, ALERT, ANTICIPATORY FEELING OF EXPECTATION. SOMETHING DEFINITELY BEGINS TODAY. BEYOND THE FULL DAY SPENT FIELDING ENDLESS MONTY Python questions, the adventure will really begin this evening, when I fly into Logan and meet the buses. They will be our home for three and a half months. There is something essentially North American in attempting to cross the continent in these covered wagons. I feel like an early settler. [Hang on I’ll get you one.—Ed.] Opinions are divided as to how mad this is. Richard of York, my temporary PR man, who has long, flowing white hair and battles along like a cross between Max Wall and Shakespeare’s cheerful Richard the Third, looks at me as though I am mad. To him, the very thought of being stuck on a tour bus is insane. My friend Dave Mirkin, who is the number one James Taylor fan in the world, says that James likes the tour bus, and even, in his own egalitarian way, sleeps in one of the bunks and not in the huge Big Bastard Bedroom at the back. My own egalitarianism does not stretch quite that far. I can’t wait to see how being in that little moving cabin will feel. We have a four-hour journey from Boston to Rutland this evening, so there’s a great chance to try it out. Also I have asked our tour manager to shove some grub aboard for everyone. Skip Rickert is our tour manager, a handsome chap, onetime actor, and current Pat Boone impersonator. He has flown in from Tucson and has prepared for his role on the Greedy Bastard Tour by taking the Sex Pistols around America. Surely after that we should be a doddle.1
The challenge of the incessant interviews—really a form of verbal swordplay—has driven from my mind last week’s rehearsal anxiety of trying to remember my lines. For the first time in my life I intend to do some stand-up material, and as I have never done this before, I am anxious about remembering the sequences. Of my comic friends both Eddie Izzard and Billy Connolly claim not to learn their stuff. Billy says he just walks onto the stage and starts talking. I believe him. He always talks the same, whether his audience is one or one thousand. It’s a form of exterior monologue. He’s like a man constantly querying reality, endlessly reflecting on what is unfurling in front of him.
No day of my life passes without someone saying the words “Monty Python” to me. It ’ s not bad. People stop me on the street and say, “Hello, Mike.” They congratulate me on the travel show and they say how much they enjoyed A Fish Called Wanda …and whenever I ’m mistaken for Michael Palin, I always say “Yes I am him. Now fuck off you ugly old bastard!” Because I want to help destroy his reputation for niceness.
Eddie is different but claims to use the same technique. He talks in paragraphs of subject, and these can extend or shrink or swap position depending on his mood. He does leap into total improv at times and says these are the times he loves best. He can even make himself laugh at these moments. Kevin Nealon usually works from a tight script. He has his material prepared and will occasionally glance at his notes or openly pretend to distract the audience, pointing to the back of the room (“Will you look at that?”) while he produces his notes from his pants. It’s tough to tell with Robin Williams. He is so fast you never really know when he has slipped into pure inspiration and when he is recalling some previously explored thought pattern. In a sense he is always rehearsing and will stop anywhere and grab a little crowd whom he delights with a swift verbal workout. I have seen him do this from Paris to St. Petersburg, and there have been times when I have been certain he is utterly improvising. It still flies out in finished sentences, making broad plain sense. No one is faster than him. He is faster than the speed of thought. He can take a concept from my lips and before I can get a second thought out he will have turned it upside down, inverted it, examined the flip side, stood it on its head, agreed with it, destroyed it, and handed it back x-rayed, stamped, and marked “thoroughly examined.” Of course it is genius, and I don’t like using that word in showbiz, since it so often means a guitarist of merely moderate ability. But trying to do comedy alongside Robin is like trying to solve a math problem alongside Einstein: you’re lucky to be in the same room. My own humble experience with direct communication with an audience lies not in stand-up but in speeches. Once or twice I have been cornered into delivering public addresses at rubber-chicken events and have managed to garner a few laughs. I am hoping that stand-up won’t be all that different, but, no question, it gives this tour an extra nervous edge for me. On my last tour, Eric Idle Exploits Monty Python, I used to open act two by talking directly to the audience. Now I am preparing to open act one in this way. We shall see.
My name is Eric Idle. If you think you’re here to see Billy Idol you can fuck off now….
I begin the day’s promo activities with a quick cab ride to The Edge, an edgy radio station named unaccountably after an Irish guitarist. A twenty-four-hour game of Twister is in progress in the middle of the studio and three young women are in obscene positions on the floor as I enter. On the air, live, I say how enjoyable it is to watch nude Twister on the radio. I am fairly rude throughout—hello, what else is new? I even sing the whole of “Sit on My Face” in my adrenaline-driven panic.
Sit on my face and tell me that you love me.
I’ll sit on your face and tell you I love you, too.
I love to hear you oralize,
When I’m between your thighs;
You blow me away!
Sit on my face and let my lips embrace you.
I’ll sit on your face and then I’ll love you truly.
Life can be fine if we both sixty-nine,
If we sit on our faces in all sorts of places and play,
Till we’re blown away!
The deejays mercifully guffaw and seem not to have heard it before. Thank God for Monty Python! As we begin broadcasting, a news TV station on a monitor in the studio scrolls my name as a forthcoming attraction at Massey Hall. It is spelled Eric Idol. I rant about this on air, insisting I am a lazy bastard not a fucking goddess. You would think the promoters might get my name right, wouldn’t you?
On Inside Entertainment with David J. Roberts I get carried away and start improvising a new reality show called The Binnie Laden Show, live from a cave in Afghanistan, where Binnie, the little-known brother of the world’s most famous terrorist, shows people around his new cave. “We have knocked through here to scrape out a kitchen/dining area.” I feel it could be some kind of reality show like The Osbournes; a sort of BBC Changing Caves show. Then I get a sudden flash of trying to pitch this to network executives and start giggling hysterically. Network executives are the pits. The word “executive” is pretty much of a warning signal. “Executive producer” tends to mean the brother-in-law of the man who does nothing. When I worked with network executives I found them comfortably the least funny people in the world, and I always wondered how they managed to achieve their domination over the funny people and the funny process. The record industry was ruined by executives, and so was the video industry; and now the DVD industry is busy bullshitting itself into thinking it creates the product that it merely sells. It’s as if greengrocers suddenly claimed credit for creating strawberries. I once did a sitcom with John Rich, a man who directed All in the Family and The Dick Van Dyke Show and knows a thing or two about where the laughs are. A young female executive rushed in and gave us a note.
Sadly, this is still the Bush era. If you’re going to try to impose democracy on somewhere weird, filled with lots of foreigners, why not start with Florida?
“Wear more green,” she said.
“What?” we said. “What did you just say?”
“Wear more green,” she said. “Tests have proven people feel more comfortable watching people who wear more green.”
We were too stunned to ask if we should employ leprechauns.
What could be finer than a decent meal and a chance to talk about oneself to a polite Canadian journalist? Richard Ouzounian tells me his daughter is at college in Halifax, and her friends are without power after a hurricane. They save up their batteries so they can watch a Python movie every night on someone’s laptop. To keep up their spirits they are singing “Bruces’ Philosophers Song”! Too bad I won’t be going near Halifax, though we are singing the “Philosophers Song” and have brought along a huge flat with the words on.
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.
There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya ’bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, on half a pint of shanty was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away, half a crate of whiskey every day!
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram.
And René Descartes was a drunken fart: “I drink, therefore I am.”
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he’s pissed.