Terry Jones, the actor, writer, scholar, musician, and comedy legend, died last week at age 77 after a long and devastating battle with dementia.
Jones wasn’t a legend in the abstract sense of the word. He, along with Eric Idle, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman, and Terry Gilliam, founded Monty Python, a group that, quite frankly, invented British humor. He appeared in the group’s television series, co-directed the landmark comedy film Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Gilliam, and directed the troupe’s follow-up films Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life, all of which eventually became cultural monuments.
Jones grew up in the United Kingdom, first Wales and then Surrey, and met some of his Monty Python co-founders while studying at Oxford. He was a scholar, not a class clown, and shortly after Jones’s diagnosis with dementia, Palin told media, “The first thing that struck me was what a nice bloke he was. He had no airs and graces. We had a similar idea of what humor could do and where it should go, mainly because we both liked characters. We both appreciated that comedy wasn’t just jokes.”
The friendship Jones forged with Palin was the foundation for a lifelong partnership. The pair were writing partners for years before creating Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a “blend of satire, surrealism and silliness,” according to the Houston Chronicle but maybe better described as hilariously and incredibly irreverent.
He was somewhat miffed, though, when the Oxford English Dictionary labeled his brand of humor “Pythonesque,” telling the New York Times in 2009, “The one thing we all agreed on, our chief aim, was to be totally unpredictable and never to repeat ourselves,” referencing the Monty Python troupe. “We wanted to be unquantifiable. That ‘Pythonesque’ is now an adjective in the OED means we failed utterly.”
Jones often played female characters, “playing a succession of middle-aged battle-axes stomping across the screen in support hose and headscarves,” per NPR, and frequently appeared in the nude — his idea, apparently, designed to reinforce the absurd nature of Monty Python’s signature humor. He co-wrote Monty Python’s iconic “spam” sketch, where a wartime waitress runs through a rationed menu that’s mostly canned meat, starred as Sir Bedevere, who comes up with creative ways to identify witches in the kingdom (“Might we burn her?” the villagers ask. “How do we tell whether she is made of wood?” he famously responds), and headed the Spanish Inquisition as Cardinal Biggles.
But Jones had a life far beyond comedy. His family, in its statement about his death, labeled Jones a polymath. Indeed, he was a scholar of ancient and medieval history, a director, a musician, and a writer of more than just memorable sketches. He penned poetry, books about Geoffrey Chaucer, and children’s literature. And that’s what he wanted to be remembered for, he told an interviewer in 2011.
“Maybe a description of me as a writer of children’s books or some of my academic stuff,” Jones told a Welsh paper. “Or maybe as the man who restored Richard II’s reputation. He was a terrible victim of 14th-century political spin, you know.”
He was diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia, a form of frontotemporal dementia, in 2014 after he found himself unable to remember lines written for him to perform in a Monty Python reunion event. It took his life slowly and cruelly, robbing him of his speech before, last week, finally taking his life.
His family released a statement saying simply that “we have all lost a kind, funny, warm, creative and truly loving man whose uncompromising individuality, relentless intellect and extraordinary humor has given pleasure to countless millions across six decades.”
His Monty Python cohorts remembered him as only they could.
“HE WAS A VERY NAUGHTY BOY!! … and we miss you,” Terry Gilliam wrote on Twitter. “Terry was someone totally consumed with life … a brilliant, constantly questioning, iconoclastic, righteously argumentative and angry but outrageously funny and generous and kind human being … and very often a complete pain in the ass. One could never hope for a better friend. Goodbye, Tel.”
“I loved him the moment I saw him on stage at the Edinburgh Festival in 1963,” remembered Eric Idle. “So many laughs, moments of total hilarity onstage and off we have all shared with him. It’s too sad if you knew him, but if you didn’t, you will always smile at the many wonderfully funny moments he gave us.”
“Farewell dear Terry J. Two down, four to go,” Monty Python’s official account tweeted. “Love Terry G, Mike, John & Eric.”
Emily Zanotti is the senior editor of the Daily Wire.
