Graham Chapman is, of course, one of the founding members of Monty Python's Flying Circus.  His writing partner was John Cleese and in addition to playing various characters in the show itself, he stared as King Arthur in The Holy Grail, and was Brian in Life of Brian.  After the group's breakup, Graham had a number of projects also; he wrote and stared in the universally panned movie Yellowbeard, and penned his memoirs, A Liar's Autobiography Volume IV.

While publicizing his book, he made some public appearances where he took questions from the audience.  From this he hatched the idea of a short tour, and in 1988 he appeared on several college campuses telling some of the stories he's collected over the years.  Happily, a couple of these talks were filmed, and now Arts Magic has released them under the unlikely title Looks Like a Brown Trouser Job.

Chapman was one of the Pythons with the most surreal senses of humor, and some of that comes across in this show.  This isn't a stand up act though, it's more of a lecture, where Graham tells some very amusing anecdotes about his life and his friends.

He starts of talking about how he became a member of the Dangerous Sports Club, without doing any dangerous sports by the way, and the type of stunts the members would pull.  He then moves on the some funny stories about Keith Moon (the drummer from The Who) and teaches the audience how to play a game he learned in medical school called "shitties."  It has to be seen to be believed.

The early days of Monty Python are discussed, as well as how he and John Cleese would write their sketches, though his days with Python were not covered as extensively as I would have liked.

The question and answer session at the end of the show was one of the most interesting, though some of the questions were pretty lame.  In this section he talks about how they came up with the coconuts in Holy Grail, as well as his thoughts on Life of Brian, and the movie's detractors.  It was pretty interesting to hear his opinion of Terry Gilliam's talents as a director.
 
This is a very amusing show.  Chapman's delivery is very good, and he know exactly when to pause for comic effect.  Many of the stories elicit laughs, but this isn't an outrageous comedy like Monty Python was.  It's more like listening to an amusing friend tell some funny stories.

This disc will obviously be appealing to die-hard Monty Python fans, but only those who are really interested in every aspect of the show and its cast.  The show is entertaining, but not much more than that.  It isn't as funny as a stand-up comedy routine, and you don't really get to learn a lot about Python or even what Chapman was like as a person.  Having said that, the show does provide a few good laughs.

Video:

The video quality to this DVD is really, really poor.  This was filmed under the supervision of Graham Chapman, according to the opened text that apologies for the sub par video quality, but this really looks like it was recorded on a low grade VHS camcorder.  And about a third or fourth generation copy.  The image was very blurry and out of focus, and looked like an amateur job.

Audio:

The two channel mono soundtrack didn't sound very good either.  The show was pieced together from two different lectures, and while one sounded a bit better than the other, neither were clear.  The audio was obviously recorded off of a microphone in the hall and not off of the sound board since there is an annoying echo throughout the whole show.  A rather strong hum is also audible which gets rather distracting.  It is also rather hard to hear many of the questions that the audience asks, even though they were speaking into a microphone.  Both the audio and video of this disc is very well below average.

Extras:

There are a good amount of extras on this disc that are sure to please Python fans.  First off are several audio only bits of interviews with Graham, about eight minutes in all.  There are also seven bonus video clips.  Four are extra questions that Graham answered during his lectures, and there is also a TV commercial for Solagas (a double paned glass company), a bungee jump bit he did for a telethon, and an Iron Maiden video, Can I Play with Madness which was his last appearance on camera before he died.

There is also a "Chapmanography," a text based biography with listings of his books, films and recordings.

Final Thoughts:

Graham Chapman died in 1989 and it is nice that this is available for hard core Python fans.  Though even the casual fan of the show will find many of the anecdotes amusing, there isn't a lot of replay value to this disc.  After you've heard the stories once, they most likely will loose their impact, the exact opposite of the Monty Python shows themselves.  The audio and video quality is really dismal, and is another reason that this disc has limited replay value.  It looks and sounds more like a bootleg VHS tape than a recently released DVD.  This disc is a Rental at best.