Monty Python vets visit for evening of sketch comedy and conversation

“It’s amazing,” Eric Idle says. “When a whole audience is singing names of philosophers, you think ‘How odd is this?’ ”

Not so odd if the name Monty Python is attached. If you could still call fans of the British comedy troupe a cult following after 47 years, it’s a big cult.

“It’s very strange, because even now, I find we get three whole generations of people,” the 73-year-old Idle says. “People introduce their sons and their sons introduce their sons, and daughters. It’s kind of unusual I think in comedy, that all generations can enjoy it.”

Idle and John Cleese, 77, spent most of the past year touring with “Together Again at Last … For the Very First Time,” which visits The Venetian on Friday and Saturday.

Just don’t expect the Cheese Shop, or the Ministry of Silly Walks. The surviving Python members reunited in 2014 for a series of instant sellout concerts in London. “We did every major popular sketch that there was,” Idle says, so he and Cleese didn’t want this one to come off as “ersatz,” with “two people doing six people’s material.”

Instead, the two cooked up a mix of new sketches and honest reminiscence, broken up with film clips and the occasional song (such as the one about the philosophers and a guy named Bruce).

“There’s talking and banter and singing. We do sketches they don’t know. Some of which are very funny, obviously,” Idle says.

“We aren’t like two stand-ups; we’re like two friends who come on and talk about our lives,” Idle says. “I think people like conversation because there’s not a lot of it on television anymore.”

The two sit in armchairs and mostly just talk, a live memoir format also tested at The Venetian this year by Al Pacino and Sophia Loren. For Cleese and Idle, the idea was born of a promotional gig for Cleese’s 2014 memoir, “So, Anyway …”

“John asked me to interview him for his book when it came out. ‘Just come on stage, we’ll talk.’ Two hours went by. So much past and experience we went through together,” he recalls. “That conversation was the basis for it, and then we would insert performing bits.”

Even now, he says, the two are still perfecting the second half of it: “It’s loose; it’s not rigid. It’s not set in stone, which is nice.”

Most of the reviews praise the duo’s natural rapport, which doesn’t come from as much time on stage together as one might think. The two met at Cambridge in 1963 and have since been “whirling around (one another) like a solar system. Sometimes they’re far away and sometimes they get quite close,” as Idle explains it.

“At the end you see these lives laid out which kept intersecting in different and bizarre ways. A privileged life, but also we kept going, which was fun.”

Idle flirted with stand-up for “The Greedy Bastard Tour,” which visited Las Vegas in 2003. But he had a huge Broadway hit overseeing “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” the musical adaptation of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” which eventually landed at Wynn Las Vegas in 2007 and 2008.

The musical seemed a natural for the Strip but, like most Broadway titles, proved a tough fit: “Each weekend is a whole different audience, and they certainly had their own agendas about what they wanted to see,” he says.

But now, “I wouldn’t have gone on the road on my own. It’s a lonely job,” Idle says. “But with two, it’s not. It’s kind of fun … and after the age of 70 it’s completely unlikely.”

Fans don’t recite the Python TV sketches to him the way they used to. But people still smile.

“If you walk into an airport and somebody looks up at you and smiles, you know you made them laugh at one point, and they’re remembering that you made them laugh.”

Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.