Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus– Blu-ray SteelBook Review
By Matt Callard
There are curios, there are lost treasures, and then there is Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus, a cultural artefact that gets odder with the passing of time. For Python fans and completists this release is essential. Not because every sketch works, because some absolutely do not, but because these two German TV specials catch Monty Python at the precise point where their genius, ambition, arrogance and glorious idiocy were all fizzing at once.
Recorded for West German and Austrian television in 1972, the two 45-minute specials were filmed mostly on location in Bavaria, and made under circumstances that would have defeated almost any comedy troupe. The first episode was performed in German, a language most of the Pythons did not speak; the second was recorded in English and dubbed. The outcome is more interesting than just a couple of eps of Flying Circus in translation, it is Python refracted through post-war Germany, regional folklore, television experimentation and sheer comic nerve.
What makes Fliegender Zirkus fascinating is that it sits at a strange historical crossroads. In Britain, Python had grown from a lineage: The Goon Show, Oxbridge revue, Do Not Adjust Your Set, the satire boom, At Last the 1948 Show. West Germany did not have that same comic ecosystem waiting to receive them. Its post-war artistic avant-garde had gone elsewhere – into new music, new film, new design, new technology. Before Python, British-language screen comedy that had done well well in Germany tended to be broader, more physical and less verbally surreal – Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin, Freddie Frinton’s Dinner for One. It’s fair to say its reception in Germany was mixed.
This means there is tension everywhere. These shows are not perfect, but their imperfections are the point. The first special’s German-language delivery is stiff and strange (Germans found a lot of it hard to understand). Some sketches move like furniture. Yet that awkwardness gives the programme an alien charm. Python already loved broken systems; here, the broken system is the show itself – translation, dubbing, cultural displacement and all.
“Pushing beyond”
The best material, though, is still superb. The Philosophers’ Football Match remains the crown jewel, a sketch so beautifully conceived it barely needs language: Germany v Greece, with great thinkers wandering about the pitch until Archimedes has the only useful idea in Western philosophy. Silly Olympics is a perfect Python assault on ceremony, competition and official seriousness. The Lumberjack Song, reframed through Austrian border police absurdity, is less fresh but still a joy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Terry Gilliam’s animations survive the cultural crossover best of all – his grotesque cut-out nightmares always had an international language.
Not everything earns its place. A fascination with Albert Dürer is historically interesting rather than funny and a few of the longer fairy-tale passages sag badly. Viewed through today’s lens, one scene with austere German businessmen chasing around pretty fräuleins because they just can’t help it runs perilously close to Benny Hill, satire or no satire. Plus, there are moments where the local references feel like Python doing a bit of German homework while wearing a false moustache. The show can be patchy, and anyone pretending otherwise is polishing a dead parrot, but even these weaker sketches matter. They reveal the group pushing beyond the BBC studio, beyond British class satire, beyond their own safety railings.
The extras are good too. The inclusion of the 1971 Euroshow Fish-Slapping Dance, outtakes, restoration demo and the long-unseen Montreux Special gives the package real scholarly and fan value.
This is not the best Monty Python release for newcomers. It is too eccentric, too uneven, too historically loaded. But for anyone who cares about Python as more than a greatest-hits machine, it is indispensable.
Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus is released on Blu-ray SteelBook by Mercury Studios
