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This article, reprinted here with the permission of its author, orginally appeared in Completely Different on February 4, 1998
It’s amazing what a dead man can get away with these days.
Graham Chapman, you may have heard, has been gone for close to ten years now. And while that has certainly made any future Monty Python reunions difficult, it hasn’t stopped Chapman from releasing new projects of his own.
Some ex-parrots, I suppose, aren’t content to just sit around pining for the fjords.
So we had A Six Pack of Lies, a lovely little recording of a talk Chapman gave at Georgia Tech shortly before his death to throat cancer in 1989. And now we have Graham Crackers, purporting to be brimming with "fuzzy memories, silly bits, and outright lies" and the closest thing to a sequel to Chapman’s earlier A Liar’s Autobiography we’re likely to get now that the man who once was Brian has run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.
Compiled by Jim Yoakum (the same bloke who put together A Six Pack of Lies), Graham Crackers is -- how shall I put this? -- staggeringly slim. It’s not a bad book by any stretch -- it is quite laugh-out-loud funny in parts -- but it is perhaps more remarkable for what it leaves out than for what it includes.
Case in point: Our Show For Ringo Starr. Based very loosely on "a few of Ringo’s hit songs" and written by Chapman and Douglas Adams, the show was never produced. "It would have made a nice show," Chapman wrote, but based only on the very small excerpt Yoakum has provided, it’s hard to see how and it’s a little hard to fault the networks for never approving the script. Yoakum just doesn’t give us enough to really judge.
The same, unfortunately, is true of his own script (written with Chapman’s long-time companion David Sherlock) of A Liar’s Autobiography. At seven or eight very short pages, it simply isn’t enough to give us a clear sense of the whole. It’s ain’t bad, but it also ain’t enough.
The rest of the book -- except for some delightful bits about building a birdhouse and some sketches written by Yoakum and Chapman together -- reads like a transcript of its audio counterpart, A Six Pack of Lies. The first and final sections, Fuzzy Memories and Outright Lies – days pre and post-Python, from Keith Moon to the Dangerous Sports Club -- are almost exactly the same, letter-for-letter and word-for-word. If you’ve heard A Six Pack of Lies, you can probably do without most of these two sections.
And they take up half the book...
The inside dust jacket also brags of "never-before-published photos," but, sadly, they are also nothing to write home about and certainly nothing that hasn’t been seen before in one form or another. There’s a nice snapshot of the Dangerous Sports Club trying to ride a large horse on skis, and there’s a very funny faked image of Chapman filling in for Elvis with Nixon...but it just isn’t enough.
And that, more or less, is my only real complaint against the book. It doesn’t go far enough or give enough that hasn’t already been given somewhere else. There’s nothing especially new here or inventive, and even the magic that came with hearing Graham actually speak the words on A Six Pack of Lies is gone. Yoakum would have done better, I think, had he simply republished the out-of-print Liar’s Autobiography rather than try to follow it up with this promising but ultimately lackluster sequel.
But that, I suppose, is just the way the cracker crumbles.
And now, in the interest of fairness, an unexpected response from the author, Jim Yoakum:
Granted the book was slim, but that was due more to an editorial decision by the publisher than by me. Believe it or not, there are actually bits that were left out. As far as photos, well I must protest your comments: aside from a few shots from the films, none of these photos have ever been published before. They are straight from Graham's personal collection. Your comments that the script excerpts were not long enough in order to judge, well, probably -- but be fair -- I was very restricted on how much I could publish, and I thought what I did show was a treat for the fans who would never have otherwise been able to read ANY these fabled script. I'm terribly sorry that you couldn't see beyond what wasn't there long enough to just enjoy what was there.
And because we can't get enough of this "fairness" thing, our own Fred Coppersmith's response to the response:
I'm guessing here, since your e-mail has sort of hit me out of the blue, but you're responding to the review of "Graham Crackers" I wrote and put up on the Penn State Monty Python Society website, right? Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy the book; I think parts of it (my personal favorite being the strange and surreal "More Room in the Armoire" sketch) are absolutely wonderful But I do stand by what I wrote. I think it's a little lackluster, and certainly a little slim. I don't actively discourage people from buying the book -- not at all -- as it is a treat for fans, especially since there's so little about Chapman available. But I was...well, left wanting.
I mean, perhaps I was a little unfair (about the photographs certainly). Admittedly, I didn't know the restrictions you were under, what you had access to and what you could or couldn't publish. Or what decisions were made by the editor. Maybe I shouldn't look the gift horse in the mouth, eh? Because a tidbit of "Our Show for Ringo Starr" (for example) may be not be enough by which to judge the quality of the entire script. But it's a helluva lot better than a sharp stick in the eye.
(sigh) I think that's probably the closest I'm going to get to a rave review. I liked the book, but I loved the CD. And the former was just a bit of a let-down after actually hearing Chapman speak the words. I mean, is that so wrong? Will you forgive me for not gushing and giving the book...if not exactly a thumbs down, a very weak thumbs up?
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