Michael Palin is best known for his performances as a member of the six-man British comedy troupe Monty Python. Although it is surely the case that some of Palin’s most memorable work was with Monty Python, both in the group’s TV series, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and in its films and live performances, the versatile comedian-actor also has done much notable television work on his own, including Ripping Yarns and Around the World in 80 Days.

Palin’s comedy career began at Oxford University, where he wrote and performed comedic revues with classmate and future Python Terry Jones. After graduating with a history degree in 1965, Palin moved to London, where his first TV job was as host of Now!, a teenage pop music show broadcast by the now-defunct Television West Wales. In his spare time, he continued to write with Jones, who was working for the BBC. The team wrote scripts for The Ken Dodd Show, The Billy Cotton Bandshow, and other BBC shows.

Palin and Jones first worked with fellow Pythons Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and Eric Idle in 1966, writing for The Frost Report. Palin also worked with various future Pythons on Do Not Adjust Your Set (1968–69) and The Complete and Utter History of Britain (1969), a Jones and Palin production.

In 1969 Palin, Jones, Chapman, Cleese, Idle, and Terry Gilliam (the group’s lone American) created Monty Python’s Flying Circus, after rejecting other possible titles such as “Owl Stretching Time,” “Vaseline Parade,” and “Bunn, Wackett, Buzzard, Stubble, and Boot.” The show ran on the BBC for 45 episodes, from 1969 to 1974, and took on a life of its own, spawning five films, a series of stage shows, and numerous books, records, and videos.

Some of Palin’s most memorable performances on Monty Python’s Flying Circus include a man who believes he is qualified to be a lion tamer because he already has the hat; Arthur Pewtie, who suspects his wife is being unfaithful and goes for marriage counseling, only to watch the counselor make love to his wife; a lumberjack who, in his spare time, “puts on women’s clothing and hangs around in bars” (and sings about it, backed by a chorus of Mounties); a cheese-shop owner whose shop is “completely uncontaminated by cheese.”

With a kindly face and gentle demeanor, Palin is frequently cast as a sweet, unassuming man (such as the cheated-upon Arthur Pewtie, or the stuttering animal-lover Ken in the film A Fish Called Wanda). But he is equally good in more outrageous characters (like the transvestite lumberjack, or, in another Python sketch, a high court judge who removes his robe, revealing that he’s wearing only ladies’ underwear beneath).

After the TV series Monty Python’s Flying Circus ended, Palin continued to perform with the group in films, stage shows, and a series of Secret Policeman’s Balls, benefit concerts for Amnesty International that featured several comedians and musicians. Palin also hosted four episodes of NBC’s Saturday Night Live from 1978 to 1984.

In 1976 the BBC began airing one of Palin’s most memorable efforts, Ripping Yarns. Conceived, written, and performed with Jones, Ripping Yarns consisted of two series, one of six shows and one of three shows. Each show had its own plot, and the plots were not interrelated; the stories were based on English tales of the early 20th century.

For the next several years, Palin appeared mostly in films. He returned to television in 1989’s Around the World in 80 Days, a six-hour documentary of his attempt to re-create Phileas Fogg’s fictional journey, retracing Fogg’s route using only transportation that would have been available in Fogg’s day. Followed by a five-man BBC crew, Palin traveled on trains, hot-air balloons, dogsleds, and garbage barges through Greece, Africa, India, Asia, the United States, and back to England.

Palin has since starred in a number of similar travelogues. In Pole to Pole (1993), he and a BBC crew traveled from the North Pole to the South Pole, through Finland, Russia, and Africa. Full Circle with Michael Palin (1997) took Palin around the Pacific rim, whereas Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure (1999) recorded his encounters in the places Ernest Hemingway described in his writings, from Spain to Africa to Cuba. Palin also appeared in a variety of roles in a 2001 series written and hosted by fellow Python Cleese, The Human Face, an entertaining exploration of beauty and human expression.