Monty Python and Philosophy (2 page)

 

The Undead and Philosophy: Chicken Soup for the Soulless
(2006) Edited by Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad

 

 

 

GARY L. HARDCASTLE and GEORGE A. REISCH

Pythonist: A person who professes to prophesy through some divine or esoteric inspiration.

—
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged

 

E
ngland. Sunday evening, October 5th, 1969. A big surprise awaits those switching on their television sets and settling in for an evening of entertainment. A game show features Genghis Khan dying, his death scored by panelists. An advertisement for butter heralds its superior taste, all but indistinguishable from that of dead crab. And excited sportscasters cover Pablo Picasso painting while riding a bicycle through England (“It will be very interesting to see how he copes with the heavy traffic round Wisborough Green!”). It’s . . .
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
!

At the end of the 1960s—a decade of race riots, student protests, undeclared wars, political assassinations, Woodstock, the first moon landing, and the rise of the sensitive singer-songwriter—perhaps nothing could be entirely new and unexpected. Yet Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin—collectively, Monty Python—pulled it off week after week. When a tuxedoed John Cleese intoned “And now for something completely different . . . ” (mocking the BBC, naturally), he was completely right. Characters suddenly announced their desire to be not only lumberjacks, but
cross-dressing lumberjacks. Sketches were interrupted by characters from
other
sketches. Viewers were taught self-defense techniques against fresh fruit. Somehow, the Pythons consistently found ways to move their audiences—within minutes, sometimes even seconds—from blunt incomprehension (the Fish Slapping Dance?) to fits of hearty, memorable laughter. Python fans vividly remember their first time.

For many of us, this kind of humor was just what we needed to survive the 1970s, not to mention the 1980s. By then, Monty Python had found its audience, wiggled into the collective consciousness, and become one of the most successful and influential comedy institutions of the twentieth century. After four seasons and forty-five episodes of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
, the Pythons did the proper British thing and established an empire of books, audio recordings, and feature films, notably
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
(1975),
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
(1979), and
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
(1983). As of this writing, the empire has conquered Broadway, where
Monty Python’s Spamalot
, a musical adaptation of
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
, plays to packed houses (well, at least,
we
can’t get tickets) while its creators, chief among them Eric Idle, try out various spots on the mantel for the Tony Awards
^©
that the show has won. Indeed, much of popular culture has been Pythonized. Watch George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, Andy Kaufman, Mike Myers, and their comedic progeny, or
Saturday Night Live
,
The Simpsons
,
In Living Color
,
Kids in the Hall
,
Arrested Development
, and
their
comedic progeny, and you’ll see Python again, echoed in dozens of ways. Read contemporary criticism of entertainment and culture, or nearly anything “postmodern,” and you’ll see the word ‘pythonesque’ or knowing references to “spam” or “nudge nudge, wink wink” that mark a common bond between author and reader—yep, Python fan.

Not everyone, of course, belongs to the club. We all know one or two who stare at a Python sketch the way a dog looks at a card trick. They just don’t
get it
. That’s okay, of course—just don’t offer them a Whizzo Chocolate or tell them you weren’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition, lest you get a blank stare in return. This book, on the other hand, is for people who
do
get it. Actually, it’s a book for people who not only get it, but who have, on occasion, wondered what that “it” is exactly. You’ve probably noticed the book’s title, so you won’t be surprised that we think that Monty
Python’s absurdities bear a deep and interesting connection to philosophy.

Really? What sort of “deep and interesting” connection? It’s a good thing we didn’t have to answer that question before we found contributors and put this book together, for back then we didn’t have an answer. Fortunately, our philosophical colleagues and acquaintances (whom, naturally, we hit up for chapters) were as intrigued with that question as we were. Now that we’ve assembled the book, however, we still won’t declare any simple, final theory about this connection. It remains somewhat mysterious. But thanks in no small part to our contributors, we understand much better why Monty Python and philosophy go together. It all starts with . . .

Britain was a philosophical mecca for much of the twentieth century, especially the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, where the British Pythons studied in the 1960s. Here, too, philosophical superstars like Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A.J. Ayer, G.E. Moore, and Gilbert Ryle spent the first half of the twentieth century living, working, playing, and, apparently, threatening one another with pokers.
¹
(Gilliam, for the record, spent the 1960s at Occidental College in Southern California, which, as they say, explains a lot.) For better or worse, what gets taught in philosophy classrooms around the world to this very day derives from what these philosophers achieved at Oxford and Cambridge.

True, none of the Pythons specialized in philosophy. Chapman studied to be a physician, Cleese a barrister, Jones an historian, and so on.
²
But they didn’t have to be philosophers to get a healthy dose of Russell, Wittgenstein, and the rest. The way
these philosophers approached philosophical issues, leaning heavily on an analysis of the language in which philosophical problems were cast, was in the air and influenced nearly every region of the intellectual landscape. And thus it seeped, much like advertising, muzak, or spilt Tate & Lyle’s golden syrup, into so much of what the Pythons did.

That’s why we’re calling the first part of this volume
Philosophical Aspects of Python
. These chapters look at the ways in which particular Python sketches or films illustrate some issue or idea from philosophy. They differ in a number of ways, but they all take up a particular bit of Python and wring from it the philosophical content that we suspect is, more often than not, the vestige of an Oxbridge education,
circa
1965. These chapters show what happens when twentieth-century philosophy gets run through a filter consisting of equal parts British music-hall tradition, 1960s-style anti-authoritarianism, and straightforward intelligence.

For Kevin Schilbrack, it’s
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
that serves as grist for the philosophical mill. His “‘Life’s a Piece of Shit’: Heresy, Humanism, and Heroism in
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
” (winner, incidentally, of the Award for Best Title in this Particular Volume, solely on the grounds of profanity and use of H’s) argues that Brian, the film’s hero, has existentialism written all over him (namely, the form of existentialism championed by Albert Camus (1913-1960)). Ten-year olds, and others similarly intrigued by the limits of the human digestive system, may want to turn immediately to Noël Carroll’s sensitive and delicate treatment of the wonderfully insensitive and indelicate Mr. Creosote. In “What Mr. Creosote Knows about Laughter,” Carroll finds an explanation for why we (well some of us, at least) find Mr. Creosote, from
Monty Python’s Meaning of Life
, disgustingly funny rather than just plain disgusting. Enjoy the chapter with a wafer-thin after-dinner mint.

In “The Limits of Horatio’s Philosophy,” Kurt Smith takes up the delightfully absurd sketch “Piston Engine (a Bargain)” from
Episode 43 of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
(titled “Hamlet”) and asks a simple but vexing question: What are these women, these pepperpots, saying? Smith’s answer leads us through the philosophical evolution of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), the Austrian philosophical luminary transplanted to Cambridge in the 1930s. Harry Brighouse’s contribution, “Why Is An Argument Clinic Less Silly than an Abuse Clinic or a Contradiction Clinic?,” makes use of the Python’s famous “Argument Clinic” sketch (originally in Episode 29 of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
, “The Money Programme”) to illuminate how the political philosopher John Rawls (1926-2002) analyzed our beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of social practices and institutions. Far from being a ridiculous scenario, Brighouse suggests, a real argument clinic could serve a genuine and much-needed social function.

Taking us back to Brian (Cohen, that is), Randall Auxier makes an offer that you don’t see everyday, at least not in a book of relatively serious philosophy. Auxier is willing to save your soul, both mortal and immortal, by way of the heroic anti-hero of
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
. Sound good? Do be warned: the salvation involves a dose of Nietzsche, a smidgen of Pascal, and a heads-on confrontation with the evidence we have, or lack, that God is British. Rebecca Housel’s “
Monty Python and The Holy Grail
: Philosophy, Gender, and Society,” on the other hand, invites us to view
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
from the dual perspectives of Arthurian legend and feminist ethics. Amidst the humor, Housel argues, are serious and intriguing philosophical and ethical undertones. Stephen Asma’s chapter, “Against Transcendentalism: The Meaning of Life and Buddhism,” explores the recurring themes of dehumanization in
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
and links these to a deeper dualistic framework embedded in many religions. In the end, Asma argues, the film leads us to something completely different (naturally): the Buddhist value of mindfulness. Stephen Erickson’s “Is There Life After
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
?” then offers a critique of the idea that life is a journey, its meaning somehow tied up with the journey’s destination. Erickson sees the Pythons unwittingly reducing that notion to absurdity as they offer a more compelling alternative, a view Erickson calls “comedic eliminativism.”

Okay. On then to the second part,
Aspects of Pythonic Philosophy
. Here the chapters focus not on a particular sketch or film but rather on a particular philosophical topic or idea—one that connects to several different Monty Python sketches or scenes. If you’ve come to this book looking for a particular philosophical topic (as opposed to a particular bit of Python), this is the section for you. Leading it off is Stephen Faison’s chapter, “God Forgive Us.” We are pleased to announce, in fact, that Faison’s chapter has finally settled, once and for all, those thorny and unresolved questions of God’s existence, God’s nature, and God’s relation to humanity. Well, not really. But Faison does argue that the Pythons, in consistently doing such a spectacular job parodying God’s relation to us, have provided two invaluable services. They have
raised the question
of God’s relationship to us and made immeasurably harder the jobs of well-meaning Sunday school teachers. John Huss’s “Monty Python and David Hume on Religion” keeps the focus on God by drawing illuminating parallels between the treatment of theological questions by the Pythons and David Hume (1711-1776), the skeptical philosopher who contributed greatly to philosophy despite his being Scottish. Huss has convinced us, at least, that Hume, but for his dying in the eighteenth century, would plainly have become the seventh Python.

Taking us from God to madness, Michelle Spinelli makes use of “The Idiot in Society” (Episode 20 of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
, “The Attila the Hun Show”), among other classic Python skits, to get a grip on the claim, articulated by the social historian and philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984), that what counts as madness or insanity is something created—‘constructed’ is the word—by the society in question. Don’t be surprised if, after reading Spinelli’s “Madness in
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
,” you find yourself watching
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
, Foucault in hand.

Moving the focus from theology to morality, Patrick Croskery’s “Monty Python and the Search for the Meaning of Life” performs the remarkable feat of illustrating several notions of the ethical life, as well as its pitfalls, solely by way of Monty Python. Not unlike other authors, Croskery addresses the
Pythonic flirtation with
nihilism
, the denial of values of any sort, and offers a sensible verdict: the Pythons know nihilism well, but they are not nihilists. Nihilism is also the starting point for Edward Slowik’s “Existentialism in Monty Python: Kafka, Camus, Nietzsche, and Sartre” (winner of the award for Most Names In A Single Title In This Volume. Congratulations, Ed). For Slowik, though, the Pythons’s message is more existentialist and less nihilist. He notes a particular resonance between Monty Python’s impatience with pretension and the philosophical message about life’s meaning offered by the German philosopher and redoubtable laugh-meister Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).