Eric Idle: I Survived Pancreatic Cancer. It ’s a Funny Story

About three years ago I was incredibly lucky: I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Lucky? One of the most lethal forms of cancer, how on earth was that lucky? Well, because it was found incredibly early. No, not before lunchtime, but before it had gone anywhere. A decade before I had asked my doctor for a quick death. It wasn’t for me, it was for a play I was writing called Death The Musical. With all the boomers heading for the final curtain, I thought it was an interesting subject for comedy to examine. Mike Nichols hated it. We would have read-throughs around our dining table, with fine people like Tim Curry, David Hyde Pierce, Tracey Ullman, Rita Wilson, Julian Sands, Jim Piddock, and a young Jordan Peele, where we’d read the play and John Du Prez would play the songs we’d demoed and people would laugh and be very happy and Mike would invariably say, “No. It’s crap.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Once, on Mike’s birthday, we had a reading, and when I got to David Geffen’s mansion in Bel Air for his party, Mike’s wife, his daughter, and various other friends all congratulated me on the success of the reading. “They’re all talking about how funny it was.” “No,” said Mike, “it’s still crap.” My play was about a writer who is writing a musical about death when he discovers he is about to die. Dramatic irony, right? The joke for me was that as he was only a ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized freelance health nationpod Source Type: news