Of all the members of Monty Python's Flying Circus, Eric Idle has surely had the most fruitful third act. This would be true even if he'd done nothing more than serving as playwright and co-creator of the monumentally popular Broadway show Spamalot. But following that award-winning revivification of the entire Python enterprise, Idle has been more visible than his counterparts in recent years, owing in part to his discovery that the songs he wrote for the group—especially "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" (which, he says, has been the most-played song at UK funerals for the past 10 years)—have become cherished evergreens.

Idle is currently on tour with his old Monty Python colleague John Cleese in a two-man show called, "John Cleese and Eric Idle: Together Again At Last... For the Very First Time." The tour pulled into the Moore Theatre (a venue Idle is very fond of) last night and there's one more show tonight . I spoke to him on the phone recently to find out what people can expect from the show, and a few other things besides:

I guess the obvious question is how are you guys getting along? Monty Python has been somewhat notorious for not being chummy offstage.

Well, we get along very well. This is our third tour in a year. If we didn't get along, we wouldn't go on the road together. Despite the Daily Mail, which insists that we hate each other, which is really interesting. In fact, we just hate the Daily Mail—for good reasons. It's lovely traveling. It's nice being with somebody you've known 53 years through many, many, many huge experiences, and yet there you are, going off. We're on a bus together and we stay at hotels together. We have a very nice time.

The material you're doing, is it new? Is it adapted versions of older sketches?

It's not a show like anything else we've ever done, and certainly not Python. There's a certain amount of talk, anecdotes, cross talk, and we do some sketches, but none that people know. We tell a story really, with song and clips. It's a sort of variety show, but it's based around our lives in the oddest way, and how we interconnect over 53 years. It's fun. It's not locked in, so we can go off-text. We do different things in different places.

Python fans are notoriously devout. Have you found them to be open to new things?

Our audiences come. It's their last chance to see these two old farts. "I saw them before they died," is actually I think the slogan of the show. It's fun to do that. We did 02 [Arena in London], which was like a mass, really. People were reciting along and that. But even that, I tried to make it different. I wrote it and directed it, so I put in 20 singers and dancers. There was a lot of energy on the stage singing our filthy songs. When in doubt, I bring girls onstage. One thing I learned about Python, take the Holy Grail, put girls in it, and you can have a musical. What's nice for us is we have each other onstage, so one can interrupt and one can get bored and one can wander off. It's kind of interesting. It's a nice dynamic there, and if John gets cranky, I can have a go at him. It's a lot of fun.

You mentioned the songs, and there are many stories of your friendships with rock musicians—being out on tour with the Stones, George Harrison financing Life of Brian, etc. I’ve always wondered about your relationship to musicians and rock’n’roll culture, since you sort of straddle that world and the world of comedy.

I hate rock’n’roll. I think it's a pain in the ass, but I was with Keith Richards last night. He came racing across the minute he sees me. They were fans of ours. That's what people don't realize. George [Harrison] hunted me down. Because they love it. Musicians are the first to laugh at comedy. They love comedy, and they play it endlessly in their buses. Also, we were the same generation, so we were young and they were young. Our second film, Holy Grail, was paid for by Pink Floyd and Genesis, and about 10 groups that put in money, and The Life of Brian was entirely paid for by George. It's our generation. That's what it is. Rock’n’roll per se was fun to grow up with. It was our growing-up music and our adolescent music and our rebellion music. Elvis saved our lives, and to find out eventually that Elvis was enormous Python fan was somewhat disturbing. It shook the boundaries.

It’s hard to connect the two—especially '70s Elvis.

Yes.

Despite their love of comedy, musicians are often loath to do anything that might disturb their serious image. Have you found rock musicians have an aversion to being funny, in public anyway?

They take themselves seriously because they have to be sex symbols. That's the great thing about comedians. You don't stop being funny just because you get older, and you don't have to be taken seriously, you know what I mean? That's the most important point. And you're not playing always to a younger audience to try and sell them records. That's the trouble with the trap of rock’n’roll and people who make popular music is they have to go back to these ever-younger people. In a sense, comedy doesn't have to do that, because it goes for a wider appeal, a broader appeal of ages. I think it's got long legs. You don't stop being funny. I like to read Carl Reiner every day, and Mel Brooks is funny. You're funny or you're not funny. That's it. If you're not funny, you died. Rock’n’roll, it's not really my life or anything to do with it anymore. I'm not going to the old Coachella. I'm not slogging out to the desert. If they do a comedy stage next year, I'll go, in which case we'll take the inordinate amounts of money and go hang around in the air conditioned tents.

Sorry to keep pounding the music angle, but since you were the songwriter in Monty Python, and those songs have proven to be one of the most durable elements of the troupe, are you a fan of any other funny songwriters?

I like Garfunkel and Oates. I think they're really wonderful. They write filthier songs than I do, and they're both cute and young. I like Tim Minchin. He's very good. I like filthy songs and people who write them. I don't care for serious songs. I don't listen to any pop music. It just doesn't do anything for me. I've heard it all. It's very basic, simple music that you grew up with, once you've got the chords down. I like more complex music, and I like to write more complex music actually. I use '40s and '50s chords, or '30s chords. That's more fun I think, for me. Otherwise, I'll listen to classical or jazz or something more interesting. Pop's over for me. It ended in the '70s. I never listened to any group after 1970. I think that's good.

I don't even know if “news” is the right word, but have there been developments up on the Terry Jones front? [Last month it was announced that Monty Python co-founder Terry Jones has been stricken by severe dementia.]

That's been developing for six years, you see. That's not news to us. It's just finally they announced, and I'm glad they announced, because you can't speak. That's something you can't cover up forever. It was pretty bad at O2 a couple years ago. Michael [Palin] says he doesn't show how much [Jones] understands, but he's with him, he smiles, and Michael never stops talking… That must be some kind of hell. He never stops talking. It was lovely what they did for him [at the BAFTA ceremony]. It was just really touching, and I'm sure that meant an enormous amount to Terry that they stood and applauded. It was very emotional, and great. At least he's not dead is the other thing only I can ever think of. You can have a beer with him. He won't say very much, because the words are lost, but that's part of the tragedy of dementia. It’s just one of those—with Alzheimer's and everything, we live longer, so we die from different things.

We're learning and learning more and more and there's more research going into it. There's a fortune in Alzheimer's research because of all the baby boomers now are coming into that period. That's the new holy grail. I don't think we'll ever reverse it, but we might be able to diagnose it early and slow it down, and it might be that it's genetic and we can find some kind of genetic code and some kind of genetic signifiers that run tests to say, "Oh, watch out, you're headed for this." I think we're getting better and better at that, provided we can spend a lot more money on health and research and all those good things, and a little less on guns and shooting everybody, then we will survive well I think.

Well this took a slightly darker turn than I’d imagined—though I shouldn’t have thought otherwise bringing up the subject of your ailing colleague.

It's fine. It's fine. It's good he still exists. He has a five-year-old kid and a wife, and his life is not so awful. It's harder for people around people who suffer from that than it is for the people themselves, oddly.

One last question: There's a long and storied history of Americans doing abysmally bad British accents trying to imitate Monty Python. Surely, people come up to you every minute you’re not at home. What is your response when someone lays a “wink wink, nudge nudge” on you?

On the whole, I'm not going to stop them. Actually, I have a new song I'm doing. I wrote it in New Zealand. It's called "Fuck Selfies." It pretty much stands for my position on that, so people have been warned.