This essay originally appeared in the now defunct webzine Britcomedy Digest. It was later reprinted in the pages of Completely Different and appears here courtesy of its author.

As I think back on my experiences with the Penn State Monty Python Society, I wonder where to start: with the skits, the comaraderie, the semprin... well, maybe not there.

I suppose my story starts in high school, when I learned life's lessons at the feet of that great cultural sage, Doctor Demento. Soon, my friends and I were swapping Python lines during band practice and threatening to give each other the "comfy chair". Since then, I've always felt the true test of a friendship was whether you could communicate in ridiculous British accents.

Shortly after becoming a number at Penn State, I spied a poster for a seminar on fresh fruit; and before I knew it I was absorbed into the quivering, amorphous, but somehow comforting blob that is the Monty Python Society. I helped start their newsletter. I organized the first annual Upperclassman Twit-of-the-Year Competition. I even became president.

Meanwhile, my interest in MPFC had expanded into a general interest in British comedy. For my undergraduate honors thesis, I researched two comedy schools: the "Oxbridge Mafia" in England, exemplified by MPFC; and the Second City Players, exemplified by Saturday Night Live. Somehow -- perhaps owing to arcane rituals involving SPAM -- I secured a telephone interview with Terry Jones.

Although my life in Python has involved some set-backs -- the major one being the death of my favorite Python, Graham Chapman, in 1989 -- I would say that it's been a source of joy and pleasure. The friends I made in MPS and the fun things I've done in the name of Python have lit a huge, glowing, purple and green, revolving, shooting-out-sparks light in my life.

Oh, no. I feel a Debbie Boone song coming on...

Peace (and banging too bricks together),

Alyce