{"id":2465,"date":"2020-01-22T17:00:17","date_gmt":"2020-01-22T22:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/?p=2465"},"modified":"2020-01-22T17:00:17","modified_gmt":"2020-01-22T22:00:17","slug":"remembering-terry-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/2020\/01\/22\/remembering-terry-jones\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Terry Jones"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\t\t\t\n<p>Today we honor Terry Jones, immortal member of Monty Python\u2019s Flying Circus, a tv program which truly needs no introduction. Jones was a founding Python, establishing the troupe along with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, and Michael Palin. When Monty Python\u2019s Flying Circus premiered in the UK in 1969, the troupe presented a zany, silly, and irreverent sketch comedy show that was both smart\u2026 and absolutely ridiculous. There had never been anything like it before, and the show was a hit in the UK and abroad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Jones is credited as the man responsible for Flying Circus\u2019 surrealist comedy and pacing. Instead of punch lines ending a sketch, Jones often appeared as a naked organist, or he had Graham Chapman barge in dressed in military regalia and declare a sketch \u201ctoo silly.\u201d Jones also wrote the famous \u2018Spam\u2019 sketch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even though <em>Flying\nCircus<\/em> only aired until 1974, Jones and the rest of the troupe reunited to\nfilm several movies. Jones co-directed or directed most of the Python movies,\nincluding <em>Monty Python and the Holy\nGrail, The Meaning of Life <\/em>and <em>The\nLife of Brian<\/em>. After honing his directing skills on these films, he went on\nto direct other movies, including <em>Erik\nthe Viking<\/em> and several documentary series. Some of these documentaries were\nbased on his own scholarly works, as Jones also found time to publish\nmonographs on Chaucer. He also wrote over a dozen children\u2019s books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s hard to capture the amazing life of this man in a simple blog post. I grew up watching (selected) Flying Circus sketches, and I can\u2019t count the number of times Jones has made me laugh as Sir Bedivere or Mandy Cohen. He\u2019d also probably hate this obituary, so I\u2019ll just leave you with this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.giphy.com\/media\/y3dhFCAqg97CU\/giphy.gif\" alt=\"\" \/><\/figure><\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today we honor Terry Jones, immortal member of Monty Python\u2019s Flying Circus, a tv program which truly needs no introduction. Jones was a founding Python, establishing the troupe along with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, and Michael Palin. When Monty Python\u2019s Flying Circus premiered in the UK in 1969, the troupe presented [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obituaries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}