Irreverent and self-effacing titles have long been a hallmark of Monty Python projects: Given CDs like Contractual Obligation Album and The Final Rip Off, the video game Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time, and books like The Fairly Incomplete & Rather Badly Illustrated Monty Python Songbook, the names of Eric Idle's recent touring shows—"Eric Idle Exploits Monty Python" and "The Greedy Bastard Tour"—seem to fit right in. Still, sometimes reflexive mockery cuts a little too close to the truth, particularly in the case of The Greedy Bastard Diary. Given the contents—a fluffy collection of blog entries, reprinted Python lyrics, and cheesy gags composed while Idle was on tour, and published as a saleable tie-in—the title seems almost unironically accurate.
But for all its lightweight origins and dubious jokery, The Greedy Bastard Diary is surprisingly insightful and enjoyable. Embarking on a three-month, 15,000-mile, 49-performance bus tour of America and Canada, Idle records his thoughts on his experiences, which mostly amount to pleasure over how enthusiastically his fans receive him. But when he lets his mind wander, his diary touches on topics as diverse as his first meeting with his wife, his long friendship with George Harrison, and his mother's death, and his stories are both revealing and touching.
All Idle's best humor occurs when it happens naturally in context. Talking about the Pythons' casual cruelty to each other, or the difficulty of living up to a decades-old reputation, Idle is hilarious. When he tries hard to be funny, with comic essays or disconnected one-liners—some of which are printed randomly in Greedy Bastard's margins—he often sounds forced, shrill, and provincial. His thoughts on marriage are particularly troubling, though after several pages of sneering commentary that presents women as venal, insensitive, and dismissive, and married men as slaves and animals, he insists that he's not talking about his own marriage. Just, presumably, everyone else's.
But when he's just talking about his own life—about the experiences of seeing a new town and a new theater every night, about a lifetime of being surrounded by clever, funny, pointedly unpredictable famous people, about the universal facets of life that affect those people as much as their fans—The Greedy Bastard Diary is incontrovertibly entertaining. It's the best kind of dishy, name-dropping celebrity gossip: The positive, enthusiastic, supportive kind that makes the world seem like a bright and interesting place. It's not great literature. It's not even great autobiography. But it's often great fun.