‘Monty Python’ stars’ American tour stops in Durham

John Cleese and Eric Idle are touring the South by car.

No, it isn’t the setup for a sketch by these British comedy giants who are both founding members of “Monty Python,” but real life – and the two are having a blast. Rather than land in a city and merely change planes, Idle and Cleese get to know the places they play and see the rural spaces in between. Over the next several days, the two will drive from Charlotte to Richmond, Va., to Newport News and finally to Durham, for two nights of “Together Again at Last ... for the Very First Time,” a show of largely off-the-cuff comedy and recollections.

“I love traveling by road,” Idle says, speaking from his hotel room in a Miami high-rise. “You see everything. You can stop, you can pull in, you can go to an Applebee’s and have some lunch. You see real America.”

He likes what he’s seen. Real America, as he puts it, has no boondocks anymore. He realized this several years ago: No matter where he goes, audiences are savvy and informed. People watch Jon Stewart or Bill Maher, he says, and tend to be on the same page. Audiences, too, know and love “Monty Python.” On the way out of Orlando, Fla., for example, Idle and Cleese ducked into a Starbucks for a cup of tea; the high school girls doing homework there recognized them almost immediately and went crazy.

“We thought we would be quite anonymous,” Idle admits. “That totally surprised me.”

Idle is also deeply concerned that real America has a dangerous gun problem, but more on that in a bit. It’s only one aspect of this prolific comic author (a new novel, “The Writer’s Cut,” just came out digitally), playwright (his play “What About Dick” is also recently available on iTunes), musician and comedian. In all things, he’s not shy with his opinions, and he’s often quite funny, even when he’s tackling contentious topics.

This mix is one thing that makes him such an endearing entertainer – and such an excellent conversationalist.

“The English thing is much more to shock and disturb, whereas you don’t find the same thing in the States’ sitcoms,” he says. Network comedies in the US, he observes, focus on touchy-feely messages and over-nice characters, whereas the comedy he cares about isn’t nice at all. Python, he says, had an anti-authoritarian attitude, and no goody-goody lectures.

“People aren’t like that in real life at all. No matter how much we’d like them to be like that, they’re not,” he says. “That’s why it’s ironic that Cosby, the great father figure of America, should turn out to be such a heel (laughs). But that’s what life’s like. That’s much more true-to-life than the sitcom was.”

Plus, many British shows air on the BBC, which has no commercials and writers don’t have to think about offending advertisers. True to that mindset – Python originally aired on the BBC, after all – his book “The Writer’s Cut” is a vicious takedown of Hollywood celebrity culture. It follows the misadventures of a comedy writer who sets out to pen a reality novel about all the girls he’s slept with (and a few he wishes he had). He loves, too, that he was able to release the novel digitally.

“I’m always interested in the new technology because it isn’t the same old,” Idle says. “You have the chance to be fresh. ‘Python’ was very fortunate because when we got to the BBC nobody had done that sort of show. You have a blank canvas and you can go anywhere.”

The downside to the technology, he admits, is that his book isn’t in bookstores. Idle is well-read, enjoying funny and serious books alike. He found Jon Krakauer’s “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town” a disturbing, though essential read. He worries about his daughter, who’s considering going back to college for a doctorate.

“Now you worry about colleges – not just sexual harassment now, but automatic machine guns on campus,” he says. Our interview was just five days after the Umpqua Community College massacre, and after it came up, even Idle’s jokes took on a frustrated, terrified tone.

“Can you have a tank? Why can’t I have a nuclear missile if I want one?” he asks, taking the right to bear arms to absurd hypothetical extremes. “I think you should be allowed to bear muskets. That Second Amendment should only go up as far as what they were allowed to carry in those days.”

To be clear, Idle doesn’t have a problem with guns for hunting, but with assault weapons; there’s no use for them, he says, other than to quickly kill lots of people.

“The argument that they should all be carrying on college campuses, because then they would all be safer, is about as insane an argument as it can get,” he says. “If you don’t deal with that, then this is going to get worse and worse and worse, and more and more people are going to die. It’s disturbing when they’re young people.”

A lot of comedy, though, is about dealing with things that are deeply disturbing, Idle says, and a lot of it can be about anger. As a British comedian, he wants to shock and disturb rather than moralize, but he admits gun violence may be someone else’s issue to tackle.

“There are so many great writers in America, and I’m sure somebody will write something revealing,” Idle says. “Otherwise, we’re just shocked and we go, ‘Oh, how awful this is.’”

And with that, our excellent conversation ended significantly darker and less funny than it started.

This story was originally published October 22, 2015 at 7:00 AM with the headline "‘Monty Python’ stars’ American tour stops in Durham."