you had to go through – where older students would come in and turn the lights on, and you’d all have to get up from the hard floor you were allowed to sleep on because one of you was talking – was certainly quite effective at making you want to kill the person they told you was responsible. And they’d do that night after night, so you’re going to classes the next day in your scratchy burlap underwear feeling totally destroyed.
At the same time, you do get through it, and I suppose there must be a certain deadening of feeling involved. I know similar things used to go on in the English public schools that my fellow Pythons went to, and I’ve often heard it said that this process of brutalisation automatically produces brutal people, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. To me, it all depends on the way the brutalisation is administered. If it’s meted out with a sense of humour, and an awareness that this is just a gauntlet that has to be run as a prelude to some kind of social acceptance, then the cruelty of it can be a vehicle for creativity.
No doubt many readers will have asked themselves how a fine figure of man like Terry Gilliam could have avoided modelling professionally at some point in his career. Here are the result of what – astonishingly, I’m sure you will agree – proved to be a one-off outing as clothes horse. The san Fernando Valley hot spot, the Munroe’s Mens & Boys Shop, was based in Panorama City, and my fellow mannequins were old school friends, Dick and Dave. We were just local college boys – innocents caught up in a misfiring campaign to lend credibility to a potentially incendiary combination of man-made fibres.
That 100 percent high bulk cardigan is completely washable – just like Terry himself. I think our biggest problem here was that none of us know what to do with with our hands.
By the time I got to my junior year at Occidental, the boot was on the other foot. I’d developed my own ideas of how the authority of these rituals could be put to subversive use. Oxy has a large Greek amphitheatre, and a group of us used it to stage a huge initiation ceremony for all the freshmen – first gathering them together for a torchlight parade, and then laying on this whole elaborate, solemn ceremony with music and chanting to indoctrinate them in the ‘traditions of the school’ – a series of outrageous fabrications, all of which we had come up with the day before.
In effect, we were conducting a large-scale human experiment to see if Joseph Goebbels’ propagandist concept of the ‘Big Lie’ really worked, and somewhat alarmingly I have to report that it does (or at least it did). Our entirely fictitious notions of the college’s history and heritage persisted unquestioned by those freshmen for years but, much more disturbingly, also by many in the senior classes who should have known better. How I came to be in a position to warp the mind of an entire generation of students was through the operations of the Bengal Board – an organisation charged with custodianship of that rather nebulous-sounding resource of ‘school spirit’ (something Goebbels was also very big on). Basically, it was a step on from high school cheerleading, one which happily no longer required us to become honorary girls, but instead involved making huge and elaborate floats for parades using giant wire-mesh frames and huge quantities of papier-mâché.
Jumping around and getting everyone enthused is something I’ve always been pretty good at – it’s certainly a knack which has served me well in initial funding meetings with Hollywood studios – and this was my first taste of how much fun you could have by subordinating an established institution to your own more playful agenda (which was pretty much what Monty Python ended up doing at the BBC). The kindred spirits I met up with through the Bengal Board – Art Mortimer and the two Johns, Latimer and Massey – would be my partners in crime throughout my time at college and beyond.
Everything we were doing was for laughs, and we became kind of cool – everybody seemed to want to be worker bees to help put our various schemes into practice. I’m not saying the power went to our heads, but on one occasion where there had been some kind of infraction, I remember sitting looking out of the window with my back to the perpetrator, knowing the backlighting would serve me well. At the moment I swivelled around in my chair, like some college boy Dr Evil, the poor guy was shivering with social anxiety.
These are the ‘words of year’ from a graphic in an old college yearbook. We were just looking for funny things to get people to shout out during a football game, and at one point, when I was on the microphone and trying to get everyone to ‘Give me a “Fleck”’, my bad enunciation somehow got 1,000 people shouting ‘Fuck!’ It was wonderful, although I did have a bit of explaining to do afterwards – after all, this was only 1960 and such robust Anglo-Saxon language had yet to become publicly acceptable.
It would be stretching a point silghtly to say that after an adolescence characterised by socially responsible community endeavour, Occidental saw my creativity being set free by the idle rich. But the students there did basically fall into two categories – they were either smart (hardworking scholarship kids like Dick Hallen, the minister’s son who was my freshman roomie), or they came from the kind of wealthy backgrounds that meant they could buy their way in.
The bulk of the students in Swan Hall, the dormitory where I laid my head for whatever brief interludes of sleep occurred in my second year, fell into the latter category. And although the disadvantageous impact of privilege on character has been well documented, I found myself drawn to the confidence with which these scions of the American establishment carried themselves. Practical jokes were the ultimate expression of their habitual ease, and from the simpler ones – medical students leaving a naked cadaver sitting in one of the quads, or toilet-papering all the trees – to more complex conspiracies to fill a room with crushed newspapers or reassemble a dismantled Model T Ford car inside someone’s room and have the motor running when they came in, I marvelled at the jokers’ comedic inventiveness and chutzpah.
If they got themselves thrown out, they could always go to another school, that was kind of the attitude. I wasn’t willing to take risks on that level, but I did find my energy and enthusiasm increasingly drifting away from my academic studies towards extra-curricular activities, such as orchestrating a huge campaign to get our little gang’s candidate Art Mortimer elected as president of the student body. I remember feeling especially happy about the banners proclaiming ‘The People Want Art’, and, as if to deliver on that four-word manifesto, we got hold of these huge rolls of butcher’s paper and wall-papered the Student Union building with cartoons and slogans and other manifestations of our ungovernable spirit of youthful mischief.
This did bring us to the attention of the dean, but the disciplinary process never had to go further than an uncomfortable chat in his office. And in my last year at Occidental – when Art, John, John and I took over a previously quite serious art and poetry journal called Fang, which under our guidance was rapidly transformed into a showcase for scabrous gags and unfettered cartooning – we finally found the right vehicle for our collective sense of satirical joie de vivre.
In the years since I’d been caught red-handed ‘reading’ Mad in the garage, my comic book super-hero Harvey Kurtzman had fallen out with its publisher and left in high dudgeon with the bulk of the magazine’s best artists in tow. After a couple of false starts, Help!, the new satirical magazine he started in New York in 1960, rapidly assumed the same dominant position in my early-twenties consciousness that Mad had occupied during my teens. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, it seemed our only responsible option was to try to copy it.
Other less blatant sources of inspiration for what we tried to do with Fang included the (then) fertile landscape of American kids’ TV and the many voices of the great mimic and improvisational comedian Jonathan Winters – who we all loved impersonating. I suppose there’s a fairly obvious correlation between