Martin Headon – 21st November 2011

 

 

 

 

 

Good + Mad = Great

One day in 1968, John Cleese sat down to write material for the forthcoming series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

He decided to re-work an old sketch, where a car mechanic refused to accept there was anything wrong with a customer’s vehicle – even as it fell apart in front of him.

So he wrote one about a man returning a faulty toaster to a shop. It was a good sketch, too.

But Graham Chapman thought it was missing something. “How can we make it madder?” he asked – and then in a flash of inspiration, it came to him.

Make it a pet shop. And substitute the faulty toaster for a dead parrot.

A work of iconic genius was born – and all because they took something good, and added something mad.

All the other Pythons knew that Graham was incapable of creating anything on his own. His post-Python work was a stream of aborted projects and critical failures.

But he had an unparalleled instinct for what was funny – Cleese wrote that he “would lob in an idea or a line from out of left field into the engine room, but he could never be the engine” – and thus embodied the anarchic, awkward, and iconoclastic spirit of Python more than any other member.

As an aside, Graham Chapman was, in terms of the Belbin Team Inventory, the ultimate Plant. And he was the ultimate NON-Completer Finisher.

In fact, you could study all the Pythons, and work out which Belbin role they filled. But the lesson for SCA 2.0 students is simpler than that.

As we start to think about working solo or forming creative teams, we need to evaluate our strengths. Some might have a knack for taking a half-formed but brilliant idea and turning into a realistic proposition. Others know how to take a good campaign and add the crucial twist that elevates it into the inspirational.

Some of us may embody several roles, depending on the situation. But on the whole, if you lump together two people with the same skillset, you’re just going to end up with work that’s either incoherent or uninspiring.

So it’s not enough to be mad. But it’s not enough to be good, either.

It’s when you combine the two that you make something great.