All You Need is Cash, the 1978 TV special co-directed by Gary Weis and Eric Idle, finally united The Beatles and Monty Python. Python was often thought of as “the Beatles of comedy” in America because of their Britishness, the timing of their arrival (the first season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired in 1969 just as the Beatles were falling apart) and the way each group seemed to be much more than the sum of their various member’s strengths. In the UK the Pythons were seen as part of a continuum, predecessors including the The Goon Show on the radio and Beyond The Fringe on stage and contemporaries like The Goodies on TV. But in the US in the 1970’s, Monty Python’s Flying Circus felt as if it dropped in out of nowhere. Their absurdist cheeky humor was familiar yet strange, and still accessible.

The Python’s sensibility fit in so well in America that both Eric Idle and Michael Palin proved to be popular hosts of Saturday Night Live. On an episode hosted by Idle, he showed s clip from his own post-Python sketch comedy show Rutland Weekend Television of a Beatles parody band “The Rutles” doing “I Must Be in Love,” a song written by Neil Innes. The video was a pastiche of Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night. Rutland had been a township in the UK that had ceased to exist due to government rezoning, a fact that apparently amused Idle to the point of obsessive compulsion, given the number of times the word “rut” shows up in The Rutles’ lexicon: “A Hard Day’s Rut,” “Sgt. Rutter’s Only Darts Club Band,” etc. The word seems to be used for its sound alone as comic effect. “Rut” as in “boredom” or “sex” doesn’t seem implied. After it aired on SaturdayNight Live, the video for “I Must Be In Love” inspired lots of interest as evidenced by the show’s viewer mail. The initial ideas for All You Need is Cash came from a combination of Innes’s song and an idea Idle had for a comedy sketch in which an onscreen documentary narrator has to walk ever faster to keep up with the camera pulling away from him. (Several variations this gag turn up in All You Need Is Cash.) The positive response to the clip that ran on Saturday Night Live made Idle think there was enough interest for a full length satire of the Beatles.

Remember that this was only eight years after The Beatles had called it quits. The basis for the jokes would still be fresh enough in people’s minds. Beatlemania! was a Broadway show at the time that was selling out most nights. It was an imitation “Beatles” concert for those not around or otherwise busy the first time, tributary rather than satiric but still a valid simulation. All You Need is Cash is a mix of gently mocking documentary cliches in general and the Beatles’ story in particular.

“Gently” is the operative word. All four Beatles are reported to have loved it; George Harrison even appears as a clueless interviewer. For contemporary and markedly less friendly take on the band, there’s National Lampoon’s funny but nasty Beatles issue from October 1977. It’s hard to imagine the Beatles being amused by “Fuck!” a porno version of “Help!” or the portrait of “Charlie [Manson], the Fifth Beatle.” By comparison the Rutles parody of “Help!” is “Ouch!” Title notwithstanding, it’s a harmless poke at their second film, such that Eric Idle said that once at a party, George Harrison and Ringo Starr serenaded him with the Rutles’ song.

Much of the absurdist verbal humor in the narration seems like autofill errors. The Rutles legend “will last a lunchtime.” The equivalent of “Abby Road” is “Shabby Road.” This style does score some laughs – a concert is held at “Che Stadium, named after the Cuban guerrilla leader Che Stadium” – but only rarely hits at anything deeper. The Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who was both gay and Jewish, wrote a memoir about discovering the band titled “A Cellarful of Noise.” It’s changed to “A Cellarful of Goys,” which nicely hints at how alienated Epstein must have felt, how different he knew he was from the band.

This cheeky scholar’s attention to details is where All You Need is Cash excels. The way Neil Innes’s Ron Nasty (the John Lennon substitute) nonchalantly chews gum while singing “Love Life,” just as Lennon did during the live worldwide broadcast of “All You Need is Love.” The clip from Yellow Submarine Sandwich is not only full of clever parodies of the Beatles movie but the colors have the washed-out look that TV prints of the film had in the late 70’s because they had faded that much in only ten years.

As time passes and the arcana of the Beatles history becomes less common knowledge, it’s the skewering of documentary cliches still feels fresh. Idle’s narrator travels to New Orleans to meet a black musician whom the Rutles presumably ripped off for their sound only to discover that this man in fact was inspired by them. It’s a standard reversal of expectations gag but gets close to the truth of how culture travels unpredictably across racial and economic lines. This scene is followed by a visit to another black musician who gives Idle what he is looking for when he claims the Rutles stole his sound. However, he’s immediately undercut by his wife who gleefully reports that every time there’s a documentary crew looking for the source of white music, her husband claims he started it. “I did…I did” he earnestly though weakly responds. The scene stands out, feels “real” because of the actor’s performances. When I see the woman laugh at her husband’s claims, I think “I want a documentary about them.” It’s something Les Blank or Errol Morris would have tackled early in his career.

All You Need is Cash is considered the first “mockumentary” but it’s tough to draw a direct line of succession between it and what followed. Perhaps their legend really did only last a lunchtime. In its obsession with detail, Fred Armisen and Bill Hader’s Documentary Now! series seems inspired by Cash and watching Eric Idle’s hapless narrator one can’t help but think of John Oliver. Certainly the Rutles parody of “I Am The Walrus” resembles how Oliver likes to end Last Week Tonight, complete with people in pep rally costumes and a fondness for humor about animals. But This Is Spinal Tap, released six years after Idle’s parody, uses a different documentary style, that of the Maysles Brothers’ direct cinema rather than Cash‘s assemblage of pre-existing material, and seems a bigger contemporary influence. The tone is also different. Spinal Tap and the films like Walk Hard and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping ultimately want the audience to care about the characters whereas the Rutles are as remote and as unknowable to the viewer as the band that inspired them.