Monty Python’s master of the absurd dies at the age of 77.

Today we lost one of the greatest comic voices of a generation when Terry Jones passed away after a long fight with a rare form of dementia.

Jones is of course best known for being a member of Monty Python. Like everyone in the cast he was a writer and director as well as a performer. He co-directed Holy Grail and was the sole director of Life of Brian and The Meaning Of Life. Much of the absurdity of Python was inspired by Jones’ sense of humor. He saw the world and smiled because he could see just how silly we all were.

There is one particular quote of his that I, as a comedian, find particularly poignant:

One of the things we tried to do with the show was to try and do something that was so unpredictable that it had no shape and you could never say what the kind of humor was. And I think that the fact that “Pythonesque” is now a word in the Oxford English Dictionary shows the extent to which we failed.

Terry Jones, like the rest of Monty Python, failed miserably. And we are all better off for it.