Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: A Sortabiography

Eric Idle is a VERY funny man. He has been funny for a living for 50+ years now.Like so many other folks, I began enjoying Mr. Idle in "Monty Python and the Flying Circus" re-runs on late-night TV. I haven't seen all the episodes, but enough to know that Python humor is silly and vulgar - until it's genius. My husband, daughter, and I have long communicated through movie quotes -- often from one of our favorite family-movie-night comedies, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Genius. I LOVE the peasants discussing forms of government, and boldly telling King Arthur, "Who made you King? We didn't vote for you for king!" And then Arthur explaining that no, one does not vote for a king....Anyway, the one-liners come fast and furious in this memoir, sort-of autobiography of Mr. Idle. He's pretty self-deprecating throughout, but he has been a prolific writer throughout his career, responsible for "the book" for the Broadway show "Spamalot," based on "...Holy Grail." I sure wish I'd seen the original w/ David Hyde Pierce; these days, I just want to see the show, period. Idle was also a member of the parody rock group, "The Rutles," and a TV show in Britain based on them. I enjoyed reading about all his projects, and the name-dropping was just fabulous fun. I had no idea that he and Beatle George Harrison were so close, or that George put up the money for "...Grail" to get made. I also didn't know Harrison was so funny!Here are a few funny bits:"I still remain foolishly optimistic, even with the threat of global warming, which worries me slightly less than personal cooling, and so I have written my personal recollections, before I forget everything and develop Hamnesia, which is what you get from being an old actor." p. xi (so I'm LOLing before I've even started the actual book!)" Graeme Garden and I drove around the country every week-end in our dinner jackets with David Gooderson, a man who became famous for doing a one-man show where he outnumbered the audience,..." p. 26."A party broke out, and if you can believe it, all of the Rolling Stones turned up. I of course, pretended to all the "Star Wars" folk that this was no big deal and and happened all the time, but it began an epic night which ended only at 6:00 a.m. when the cars came to pick up the actors for work and the Stones sloped off to hang upside down in their caves. When I saw "The Empire Strikes Back," I was so proud. The scene they shot that morning bears the scars of the evening. Carrie lurches out of a spaceship to meet Billy Dee Williams and says 'Hi!' Harrison is still clearly drunk. I remain inordinately proud of the scene I spoiled and hope one day George Lucas will forgive me." p. 111.I stopped marking good bits after that one, b/c they came just too fast and furiously.Idle could also move me to tears, as he recounted George Harrison's funeral and his grief at his great pal Robin Williams' death.All in all, I just really loved this so very funny and charming memoir, and the great pictures he pained with his words and with plenty of actual photographs.Thank you, Eric Idle, for bringing humor into my life with your lifetime body of work, and your book. 5 stars.

Eric Idle, the musical member of Monty Python (and also its main impressario, if not its funniest or best writer or actor) writes his memoir, the second of the crew to do so (John Cleese did a much better job of it a few years ago). Idle is quite possibly the most extroverted human being every to walk the Earth, and he seems to have been good friends with EVERYONE. There are full chapters here on David Bowie, George Harrison, and Robin Williams. The Stones appear seemingly on every other page, usually at some party or another. Idle seems to have spent his life going from friend to friend or to the West Indies, staying for weeks at a time and having epic binges all the while -- a peculiar "British baby boomer show business superstar" life style that we've heard about before (Harrison did the same thing, and Jagger, Woods, and on and on). Perhaps inevitably, the memoir is mostly just dropping names, and it frequently dissolves into something close to a police blotter: I did this, then I did that, then I did that other thing. Everyone he meets is "fabulous" or something similar, and he had a great time on everything. That about sizes it up.What this book isn't, is funny. Sure, there are some typically dry, Python-esque asides here and there, but they're almost beside the point, like they were added after someone else wrote the main text. He makes no attempt to describe the Pythons' humor, or say anything particularly new about anything. The best sections are about his childhood (amazingly, he actually did grow up in an orphanage, which he tweaked relentlessly) and the very early years of the Python partnership. The three primary movies (Meaning of Life, Life of Brian, and Holy Grail) are dealt with rather tersely and briefly, with his later triumph as the primary mover behind Spamalot (the musical) getting much more attention.Idle was not one of the more successful, post-Python members. Terry Gilliam became a marvelous director. Cleese had several triumphs as an actor and writer. Michael Palin had a long running travel series that many people (including me) loved. Idle's success, not coincidentally, was with Python's old material, in Spamalot. It makes sense because he was the most "Python-y" of the Pythons. His humor really fit only in that framework -- exquisitely silly, but not a whole lot else going on. And he was never much of a comic actor (if you go back and watch the original series, virtually all the famous skits are with Palin and Cleese, occastionally Graham Chapman). In old age, he's still the most active of the bunch -- also the youngest -- but probably the least interesting (other than Chapman, who of course is dead).Overall, a perfectly fine read but instantly forgettable and, rather unforgiveably, not very funny.

ビートルズのジョージつながりで彼に興味をもった。晩年のジョージに関しての章が泣けてくる。良い本です。

ドイツ語版ではないか。言語を購入ボタンの上に明記しなさい。ドイツ人の友達に贈りました。

Eric Idle erzählt, dass er mit George Harrison, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, kurz: mit den großartigsten Top-Promis dieser Welt befreundet ist (bzw. war, einige leben nicht mehr), dass er seine Freizeit in den exotischsten und exklusivsten Urlaubsparadiesen - bevorzugt auf den Anwesen seiner prominenten Freunde - verbringt, dass er in jungen Jahren alles weggeknallt hat, was nicht bei drei auf den Bäumen war, und selbstverständlich lässt er seine Leser auf gefühlt jeder zweiten Seite wissen, dass das von ihm geschriebene "Always look on the bright side of life" der beste Song aller Zeiten ist. Mit zunehmender Lesedauer nervt Idles Selbstgefälligkeit gewaltig.Und auch die deutsche Übersetzung schwächelt. Wenn z. B. aus dem "Ministry of Silly Walks" aus dem bekannten Sketch das "Ministerium für dumm gelaufen" wird, dann geht der unnötige Versuch, lustiger als das Original zu sein, komplett in die Hose.Mein Tipp: Lieber die erfrischend uneitlen Erinnerungen von John Cleese - "Wo war ich noch mal?" - lesen.

Eric Idles Biographie ist witzig, einfühlsam und interessant zu lesen. Idle ist sowohl selbstkritisch als auch offen, stellt sich selber nicht als Heiligen dar, was mir gut gefallen hat. Besonders bewegend fand ich die Schilderung seiner Freundschaft mit George Harrison. Auch die Schilderung seiner Kindheit hat mich sehr berührt. Idle ist im Laufe seiner Karriere vielen Berühmtheiten begegnet, von denen viele erwähnt werden. Auch David Bowie wurde dabei ein etwas grösserer Raum gewidmet. Gleichzeitig ist das Buch ein interessanter Streifzug durch die Jahrzehnte. Dazu werden viele Bilder aus Idles Privatarchiv geliefert. In jeder Hinsicht empfehlenswert.

Ein Hardcore-Fan der Pythons mag hier vielleicht nicht immer Neues erfahren. Dafür aus erster Hand.Die lausbubenhafte Erzählweise Idles tut Ihr übriges.Ebenso wie bei der Biographie von John Cleese, der dort in seiner bekannten überzeichneten Ernsthaftigkeit daherparliert, finden die jeweiligen Rollen der beiden in Ihren Sketchen und Filmen auch hier ihre Spiegelung.Habe mich gut unterhalten gefühlt.