Sketch o’the Week: Terry Gilliam!

Here’s the last of our “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” series, the lone American of the troupe Terry Gilliam!

Gilliam was born right here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, so we get to claim him as “one of us”, although he and his family moved to Los Angeles when he was 12 in 1952. You don’t survive twelve winters in Minnesota without it being frozen into your DNA.

There is a huge MAD Magazine connection with Gilliam and his eventual work with Monty Python. Gilliam started out as an animator and strip cartoonist, and was heavily influenced by the early Harvey Kurtzman MADmagazines. Gilliam would eventually work with Kurtzman as one of his assistants at HELP! magazine. HELP! was, of course, the longest running of the publication projects Kurtzman worked on post MAD/EC. Gilliam worked on the magazine and contributed some of the “fumetti” strips the magazine was known for. These were comic stories using photos rather than drawn panels. One of the fumettos he designed was called “Christopher’s Punctured Romance”, written by David Crossley, and which featured a little known up and coming comedian named John Cleese. This is where Gilliam first met Cleese. When HELP! folded, Gilliam moved to England where he did animation for the children’s TV show “Do Not Adjust Your Set”, which featured future Pythons Eric Idle, Terry Jone and Michael Palin.

So, we can thank Harvey Kurtzman and MAD for Terry Gilliam’s being part of Monty Python!