Calcium Made Interesting - Sketches, Essays, Letters, Gondolas
by Graham Chapman, edited by Jim Yoakum
Pan, HK$128
Bolivia's foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, reportedly told the US Congress foreign relations committee in March that schoolchildren should be fed coca leaves for breakfast because coca contains more calcium than milk. The late Graham Chapman, star of Life of Brian and Monty Python & The Holy Grail, would have appreciated the absurdity. Jim Yoakum, who edited Calcium Made Easy - Sketches, Essays, Letters, Gondolas, holds that Chapman had 'an innate belief in absurdity as a way of life'. The Telegraph opines in its review there's 'a great deal of absurdity, but not that much wit' in Calcium Made Easy. Good comedy is not so much dialogue as delivery. One of his stage directions was: 'A corridor, fairly butch.' John Cleese recalled in his eulogy that Chapman 'embodied and symbolised all that was most offensive and juvenile in Monty Python'. He liked to shock people because 'it gives others a momentary joy of liberation, as we realised in that instant that the social rules that constrict our lives so terribly are not actually very important'.
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