Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: A Sortabiography

by Eric Idle

This book is partly the story of that song and partly the story of a boy who became me—if you like the memoirs of a failed pessimist.

Of course I have faults, but you won’t read about them here. I’ve glossed over all my shortcomings. That is after all the point of Autobiography. It is the case for the Defense.

Men have a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to supply one at a time.

Another afternoon, playing acoustic guitar in his room, we were interrupted by a banging at the door. A young lady was complaining that Norman Lear, the legendary American sitcom creator, was trying to write downstairs and our music was disturbing him. Spot the looney. “Oh, sorry, love,” said George politely, “we’ll stop.” A few hours later a very shamefaced Norman Lear came to the door, utterly embarrassed that he had told a Beatle to stop playing guitar!

Brian, of course, is a tragedy. Pursued by his followers and wanted by the Romans, he is captured and sentenced to death by crucifixion, then the major form of execution used throughout the Roman Empire.

A party broke out and, if you can believe this, all of the Rolling Stones turned up. I of course pretended to the Star Wars folk that this was no big deal 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 that one day George Lucas will forgive me.

We went to smart opening-night parties, Dolly Parton’s first performance in New York at the Bottom Line on May 14, 1977, and lots of Saturday Night Live parties. I hosted the show four times in the Seventies and marveled that they could write anything, so fucked up did they get. Python always wrote office hours. The idea that you would try to write comedy while under the influence of anything was anathema to us. On Tuesday nights on SNL, they would write all night, the offices reeking with the scent of marijuana. The host was expected to stay up and hang with them as they got more stupefied and less and less inspired. Rewrites were unheard of. They went straight from pitch to set design. I loved the cast, particularly Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner, though they were all sweet and friendly.

One nice footnote to the Brian controversy: in our movie, Sue Jones-Davies, a Welsh actress, played Brian’s revolutionary girlfriend Judith. She was fiercely naked in one of the scenes. When the movie was first released in her hometown of Aberystwyth in North Wales, the local council banned the film from public screening. Thirty years later she became the mayor of Aberystwyth and overthrew the ban. Isn’t that great?

Professor Brian Cox and I have always enjoyed teasing Deepak. We call his chatter “The Quantum of Bollocks,” for he manages to mix cosmology and bullshit. “There are no extra pieces in the Universe. Everyone is here because he or she has a place to fill, and every piece must fit itself into the big jigsaw puzzle.” So much for physics. Brian is kinder than me, but Deepak’s form of quasi-scientific religiosity gets to him too.

I loved every second with Leslie. He was extremely funny. He would play with his own fame and had found a clever way of coming to terms with it. He had a fart machine. He kept it hidden in his hand. He used it to perfection on a crowded elevator in our tourist hotel. People would enter the elevator and suddenly notice that there was Leslie Nielsen, deep in thought, staring into the middle distance. You would see them recognize him and nudge each other. He would gaze placidly ahead, completely unconcerned, not noticing. They would be trying to make up their minds to say something, but his benign concentration held them back. The doors would close. A moment of silence and then suddenly there would be a loud fart. Louder than socially polite. Impossible to ignore. But who was it? Leslie would continue to stare straight ahead. His face would not move a muscle. There would be another loud fart. The passengers would begin to look uncomfortable. Was that … Leslie Nielsen … farting?? Now it was awkward. They could hardly burst into “Aren’t you Leslie Nielsen, we loved Airplane, can I have an autograph?” while he clearly had this epic bowel problem. Another couple of floors of silent descent and there would be another extremely loud fart. This time there was no mistaking the source. Leslie would give away nothing. Not a glimmer. Not a twinkle. The tourists’ eyes would meet. They would clearly just have to pretend it wasn’t happening. They would give this poor farting star the anony...

Another time, Jack Black asked me to sing at Festival Supreme on Santa Monica Pier, a whole-day concert he was organizing for comedians who played instruments. My pal Jeff Davis did the set with me with the assistance of my hilarious assistant Alana Gospodnetich. I had a gag I wanted to try. To introduce us, Jack Black came on and gave me the biggest showbiz intro ever. “You know him from this, you know him from that, one of the original Montys, will you all please welcome Eric Idle!” Thunderous applause, and on came Billy Idol. The crowd did a double take. What? And then laughed themselves silly. Billy played up the moment perfectly, strutting around the stage, pouting, pumping his fists, singing “I’m a lumberjack …” After a few minutes I came on, looking daggers at Billy. “What the hell are you doing?” “I’m doing the show.” “It says Eric Idle.” “No, it doesn’t. It says Billy Idol.” “Not on the poster.” “Yeah, on the poster.” We argued. We pushed. We shoved. We fought until Jeff brought out the poster and showed him. “Oh. Alright then.” Reluctantly, he left the stage to an enormous ovation. We continued our set without him, but he came on at the end and sang “Bright Side” with us. It was one of my favorite gags ever. A visual pun. Billy was such a pro, he came to my house three times to rehearse the bit.

“I thought I was dead, Eric,” he said. Carried out to the ambulance on a stretcher covered in blood, and quite possibly dying, he said to his two new housekeepers, who had just started working for him and whom he had not yet met, “So, what do you think of the job so far?” The first I knew he was going to survive those dreadful early hours was the unmistakably George quote displayed on the BBC website. When the police asked him about the intent of the intruder, he had said, “Well, he wasn’t auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys.” “Why doesn’t this kind of thing happen to the Rolling Stones?” he had asked me wryly on the phone.

The show was going incredibly well, the dates flew by, and soon I was home in LA with two days off for the presidential election. It was supposed to be the triumph of the first woman president of the United States, but unfortunately Putin had other ideas. With the unexpected and unwelcome election of Donald J. Trump, our show became therapy. At Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza the night after, the audience was still grieving. Laughter was tremendously important to them now. They laughed three times harder than before, and sang along to “Bright Side” with fervor. It was never more needed. I sang it with John on Conan, where I made a genuine ad-lib, live on the show, when I sang: When you’re feeling in the dumps Forget about the Trumps Just purse your lips and whistle, that’s the thing Sometimes jokes are just staring at you in the face, and that was one occasion. For the rest of the tour we sang that and the audience would cheer. The resistance was beginning. Across America our show was sad, glum, people coming out to be cheered up and set free by laughter. And really, laughter is the only sane response to pathological lying.

I was once coming home through LAX when a steely-eyed immigration officer peered suspiciously at me. “How long have you been a green card holder?” “Oh, I have had it for ages,” I said. “More than twenty years.” “Then why aren’t you an American?” “Erm. Er … Well …” I hesitated. What should I say? What was the correct thing to say? “Because, sir, I am an Englishman. Born and raised in England under the bombs of Hitler. A member of one of its most prestigious universities, from a college founded in 1347. A man who watched England win the World Cup at Wembley in 1966 and Manchester United lift the European trophy in 1968. An Englishman, a proud Elizabethan, heir to the traditions of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Wilde, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Dickens, a cricket-loving survivor of the Sixties and a member of one of the most admired comedy groups in the world. Is it not enough I live in your fair country and pay my taxes? Now you wish me to put my hand on my heart and pledge allegiance to a self-righteous, lying, tax-avoiding moron, and his racist, gay-bashing, environmentally dangerous, greedy-bastard, science-denying cronies, who reject evolution and the rights of women, and plunder the planet for profit to please their powerful funders, stealing the very air and clean water of their children, while tweeting insanely and lying through their teeth on propaganda TV channels that would have shamed Joseph Goebbels? No, sir! The French do not shrug at me sardonically and ask me why I am...