Graham Chapman
Birthday: 8 January 1941, Leicester, Leicestershire, England, UK
Birth Name: Graham Arthur Chapman
Height: 193 cm
Graham Chapman was born on January 8, 1941 in Leicester, England while a German air raid was in progress. Graham's father was a chief police inspector and probably inspired the constables Graham ...Show More
[Chapman and the other members of the Monty Python group traveled to visit the site of Dachau concen Show more
[Chapman and the other members of the Monty Python group traveled to visit the site of Dachau concentration camp in Germany, but were told by staff that they were too late and the museum was about to close] Tell them we're Jewish. Hide
[1974; on whether his Monty Python work serves to get something out of his system that needs to be g Show more
[1974; on whether his Monty Python work serves to get something out of his system that needs to be gotten out] Certainly in terms of writing. You get the argument from a lot of people that you're supposed to write to make people laugh. That's true. But also everything you do is written from something in your own experience. Nothing is written from outside the universe. You can't do a good situation comedy about stones. It's got to be animate. It has to be about human beings. Writing is therapeutic for me because - as you say - it gets something out of my system, some frustration, some anger. You almost have to be angry to write, I think. If you're angry about something, then you can always put something down on paper. If you're not, if you're just totally happy - and I don't actually know anyone in the whole bleeding world that is - you wouldn't be able to write a single thing. But if you're angry about something, it's possible to be witty, possible to be interesting, possible to write. Hide
I hope I will have achieved something lasting.
I hope I will have achieved something lasting.
[1974] I've always been a pacifist myself, and I've found that it's a very good thing because when s Show more
[1974] I've always been a pacifist myself, and I've found that it's a very good thing because when someone attacks you physically - and it's happened to me quite a few times - if you behave passively and just say, 'Oh, go on and do it,' they can't do anything. They're just unable to commit actual physical violence against you. It happened to me, for example, in a pub. I was being a bit show-offy I suppose, talking to a strange guy's girl friend, and he got a bit uppity about it, and he started bashing my head on the wall. But I offered no resistance and he couldn't carry on with the act of violence. It's best just to succumb and lie on your back like little dogs do. If a big dog comes around and gets aggressive, the little one just lies down on its back and puts its paws up in the air and everything's all right: the big one won't bite him. Hide
We don't deliberately set out to offend. Unless we feel it's justified. And in the case of certain w Show more
We don't deliberately set out to offend. Unless we feel it's justified. And in the case of certain well-known religions, it was justified. Hide
John Howard Davies was not a very human person ... if you made a mistake of any kind, any sort of pa Show more
John Howard Davies was not a very human person ... if you made a mistake of any kind, any sort of pause in speech, he would treat you rather as if he was a schoolmaster. Hide
[1974] I'm aggressively humble. On location for this Holy Grail film when we were in Scotland I went Show more
[1974] I'm aggressively humble. On location for this Holy Grail film when we were in Scotland I went into a pub where there was a crowd of the regulars of that place: young people, old people, quite a mixture. And I thought they were all a bit uptight, because they were all out with their wives and girl friends having nice drinks. And I'm afraid there's a trait in me that's rather aggressive in that I try to split that up and make them think again, because I know how basically unhappy most of them are. So I decided to kiss the entire pub. I went round, man and woman, boy and girl, trying to kiss the lot, and succeeded mostly, except that one particular person was very annoyed and I got thrown out. The next day I decided that the only thing to do was to go back to the same place and not be frightened. So I went back. Met the same bloke. Immediately when I walked in the door he said, 'Oh, I suppose you're going to kiss everybody again tonight, are you?' That got a bit of a laugh from his friends. I took no notice, went up to the bar, bought myself a drink, and then went and sat down right next to him and said, 'I think you're rather boring, and you're probably the kind of person that only talks about cars and the number of girl friends you've had.' And the girl who was sitting next to him suddenly said, 'You're right. He does. That's all he does.' And other people started joining in. 'That's all he talks about. Nothing but that.' He went bright red. It was a lovely moment. But it doesn't always work out. Sometimes you get your head bashed in. Hide
[1974] [Psychiatry is] an awful job. A lot of people in medicine are conservative because they come Show more
[1974] [Psychiatry is] an awful job. A lot of people in medicine are conservative because they come from conservative backgrounds. They're usually sons and daughters of doctors. That's one of the things that has held psychiatry up for so long. People who are doing it are incapable of looking into other people's minds because they don't know what normal people are like - not normal - average, one could say - all these words are horrible. But psychiatry students are theorising about their own thoughts. The way they're made at the moment has very little to do with real people. It has to do with getting a medical degree and then deciding to specialise in psychiatry. But during that time the student has met no average people. He's been in a medical school - an ivory tower. Psychiatrists, as we loosely call them, should be living in the society they are trying to help. It's a bloody difficult job. Hide
Graham Chapman's FILMOGRAPHY
All
as Actor (19)
as Creator (8)
Graham Chapman'S roles
The Man with a Tape Recorder Up His Nose's Brother
The Colonel
Brian Cohen
King Arthur
Captain Yellowbeard