Eric Idle
Eric Idle
Eric Idleis an English comedian, actor, voice actor, author, singer-songwriter, musician, writer and comedic composer. Idle is a member of the English surreal comedy group Monty Python, a member of The Rutles and the author of the Broadway musical Spamalot...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth29 March 1943
thinking insane looks
We never have that thought! The whole object is to bite off more than you can chew. John [Du Prez] always says, Eric thinks of something completely insane and insists we go in that direction. It's the correct way to look at things and the correct place to start, I think.
work-out lucky littles
Well we were lucky because we started in Canada where everybody has a sense of humour! We flirted a little while with Josh Groban. He was personally interested in it. He said oh I'd love to do something different, and I said well it's pretty different! But in the end the dates didn't work out.
people eric idle
If you're famous, you have to [be overly generous], otherwise people say, "Eric Idle came in and only left me $4." I always tip more than people expect.
country pay three
I pay taxes in three countries, but can't vote in any of them.
crazy years nuts
You could feel the place going crazy because we hadn't been on stage together for maybe 35 years and the audience could just feel us in the darkness come on and they went nuts. It made the little hairs stand up on the back of my neck and we sang Sit on My Face, which I thought was wonderfully appropriate for George's memorial, and then we bowed and we showed our bare asses.
fun nice moving
I always have a feeling you should move the playing field and the minute you know what you're doing, you're wrong. Therefore, I wanted us not to try to follow Spamalot immediately, but to do something different. This is perfect because it uses all the same skills, like story telling and lyric writing and music writing, but it's presenting it in a different form. And of course it gives me and John a nice chance to perform and show off which is also fun.
thinking knowing choices
I think you often learn from failure. Success just teaches you how great you were, but in fact it's knowing what will fail that will help you to make the right choices.
believe just-believe universe
I just believe in a huge universe of billions of miles.
writing unique thinking
There's no gap between the writer and the performer, which is what I think makes [Monty] Python unique. Five or six people who write Python and five or six who act it. That's what makes it unique.
writing comedy performing
When we graduated [ from Cambridge], we were grabbed right into television. I was grabbed straight into the practice of writing comedy. It was all writing and performing. You wrote something in order for you to perform it.
comedy tradition
I got locked into a tradition [at Cambridge] of doing comedy.
thinking trying print
Even if you've written something for print, I think it's good to try [it] out on someone because it changes. You can think it's hilarious and they can tell you it's not.
moving reason show-business
One of the reasons we moved to L.A. in the first place [was] so that it was no big deal that I was in show business. We decided if we move[d] to L.A., then everyone in one way or another was involved in it.
fun pirate film
Filming a pirate film is always good fun, with ships and indecent clothing.