Monty Python and Philosophy (7 page)

As I worked more on Morris’s little essay in which he expounds his theory, I began to wonder why he ever found it necessary to write and publish it. After all, it isn’t an obvious thing for an economist to be publishing. I was also interested in finding out more about this guy to whom Morris dedicates the essay—one Robert Earl of Orford. “Who the hell was this guy?” I wondered. As it turns out, Robert Earl of Orford is Sir Robert Walpole, who was none other than the very first British Prime Minister (well, not in the contemporary sense of Prime Minister). He’s sort of like the British counterpart to the United States’s George Washington. At first I was a bit embarrassed to discover this because it revealed how little I know about British history. But, the embarrassment quickly faded, for what the hell do I care about that? But, I digress.

According to Morris, Walpole’s mastery of wit was known worldwide. He apparently used his wit and debating skills to pull some sort of Jedi mind trick on Parliament to pass the infamous Licensing Act of 1737, which served to censor the content of plays performed in London’s theaters. As S.H. Wood puts it:

Golden Rump
? What the . . . ? “This could be good,” I thought to myself. But as it turns out, the term ‘Rump’ refers to some group of old-school loyalists who constituted the “tail end” of the old something or other and made some political hay in Parliament—or some such. The play was apparently a satire about that. Boring. Prior to my discovering this, I thought for about five minutes or so that the play was about a golden ass whose
thing
was the having of visions. This, of course—
not
so boring!

I was convinced now more than ever that the British colonies living in North America were justified in their revolt against British rule, until I recalled that not twenty-two years after the birth of the United States, John Adams, then U.S. President, signed into law The Sedition Act of 1798, which did pretty much the same thing as the British Licensing Act of 1737. It made it illegal to say or write anything that insulted or made fun of the President. One difference, however, was that the
truth
could be used in one’s defense. And so, if the President really was a cross-dresser or was too fat to ride a horse, one might be able to sidestep trouble (when depicting him as a fat-non-horse-riding-cross-dresser). Strangely enough, The Sedition Act did not say anything about insulting the Vice President, which at the time was Adams’s nemesis, Thomas Jefferson. Apparently one could have a field day with him.

Like Adams, Walpole was uptight or something, and many of England’s playwrights of the time included Walpole-like characters in their plays. Henry Fielding’s plays in particular satirized Walpole. Fielding’s work suffered so greatly as a result of the Licensing Act that he turned from writing plays to writing novels. But as Morris suggests, the sort of shock felt by the entertainment business was well-deserved. He writes:

The power of the stage was so great that it threatened Walpole’s tenure as Britain’s Minister. In light of the Licensing Act, Morris seemed to have thought that a line needed to be drawn between political satire on the one hand, and malice, libel, and treason on the other. Fixing the standards of humor, wit, raillery, satire, and ridicule—that is, fixing them as
political
,
legal
, and even
moral
concepts—appears to be Morris’s real motive for publishing the essay. Even so, in a careful read of the essay, one gets the feeling that Morris was more interested in setting standards of humor
that were
compatible
with the Licensing Act than he was in setting out a defense of humor.

Understanding the larger picture now, and coming to grips with the fact that the
Golden Rump
wasn’t about a golden rump, I decided to abandon the historico-philosophical angle all together. At least, I decided to abandon the focus on the eighteenth century. I was a fish out of water—a fish nevertheless looking to make a quick couple of hundred bucks.

Freed from my scholarly chains, I began to consider possible ‘artistic’ ways by which I might approach a study of Monty Python. I had an idea! Following a paper writing strategy that I had learned from my students, I quickly got online and visited a site that sports a well-known essay generator. It immediately generated for me an essay titled, “Realities of Fatal Flaw: Capitalist Discourse and Textual Theory,” the first section of which was titled, “Neotextual Narrative and Sartreist Existentialism.” This was like stealing postmodern candy from a computational-based-essay-writing baby. It was a bit of work, but I read the thing in one sitting. The second section titled “Realities of Collapse” was especially difficult. I got to the end of the essay only to find an important notice, which read: “The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator.” This was difficult to believe, for I swear that I almost understood what A. David Cameron, University of Illinois (who was listed as the essay’s author), was getting at. Be that as it may, my artistic vision was almost complete! My hope was to use the postmodern generator’s essay and act postmodernly, giving it the title: “This is Not an Essay, It Just Looks Like One.” But, I was immediately reminded of the 1926 surrealist painting
Ceci n’est pas une Pipe
, painted by some guy from Belgium. So, the idea of a joke essay was quickly coming to an end. As much as it grieved me, I would have to say something interesting about Monty Python. Perhaps I would return to those women with their piston engines.

It’s well known that Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) had once forwarded a theory of meaning that took hold of Moritz Schlick
and the philosophers of the Vienna Circle. It has come to be called the “Verification Principle,” which says: The meaning of a sentence is determined by its method of verification. And though Wittgenstein repeatedly denied ever having said anything like this to Schlick or to members of the Vienna Circle, this apparently has not changed the fact that it is well known that he did say it.
¹⁷
The idea of the Verification Principle is that the meaning of a sentence is determined by the various ways one could take to determine the truth of the sentence. Of course, there are some snags here. For instance, the principle itself is not subject to verification. And so, as some have argued, if we are to believe what the principle tells us, we must conclude that it is meaningless, in which case we should
un
believe it, to use a phrase from some unknown philosopher whose name I am forgetting at the moment. Be that as it may, let’s look at the piston engine skit in light of this principle.

Mrs. Non-Gorilla asks, “Been shopping?” Mrs. Gorilla answers, “No . . . been shopping.” As I suggested earlier, I take it that the latter amounts to saying: “It is not the case that I’ve been shopping
and
I’ve been shopping.” This is a logical contradiction; and so, it is false. It
cannot
be true. Verification here is a moot point. Now, if there is no way by which one
could
verify the sentence uttered by Mrs. Gorilla, then according to the principle, it seems to follow that the sentence is not false after all, but meaningless. At least, according to at least one biographer, this is one gloss of what Wittgenstein might say (Wittgenstein says about the proposition “This circle is 3 cm long and 2 cm wide” that it is not false, but nonsensical (Monk, p. 286).) Even so, Wittgenstein states in the
Tractatus
: “The proposition shows what it says, the tautology and the contradiction [on the other hand] that they say nothing. . . . Tautology and contradiction are, however, not nonsensical; they are part of the symbolism. . . .”
¹⁸
Their meaning, if we want to call it that, is merely formal. And so, we might say that even though the sentence that Mrs. Gorilla utters has meaning (though only formally), it is for all that empirically empty. In other words, she cannot be taken to be saying anything about the world.
I think that we could take this a step further and claim that although the sentence she utters has meaning, Mrs. Gorilla isn’t
saying
anything at all! Admittedly, this on its surface seems a bit odd, and I will return to it shortly. Before I do, it is worth noting that the same sort of oddity can be found in what Mrs. Smoker utters in reply to Mrs. Non-Smoker. This second exchange has an additional twist. For example, in answer to Mrs. Non-Smoker’s question about how one cooks the piston engine, Mrs. Smoker says, “You can’t
cook
that!” This, it seems to me, is true and can be verified. Mrs. Non-Smoker replies, “You can’t eat that
raw
!” This, too, is true and can be verified. So, now we have a couple of sentences that can be verified—or, at least there is a sense in which they can. Even so, is their meaning
really
determined by the ways that we would go about verifying them? For instance, is the meaning of Mrs. Non-Smoker’s reply simply our being able to verify that one cannot eat a piston engine raw? Perhaps. But, this seems so only if she is simply asserting a fact. Of course, the joke is made in her
appearing
to do just this!

With the exception of the contradictions already considered, we can easily agree that every statement made in the dialogue is true, or at least verifiably true. Even so, the conditions that underwrite their truth, and the ways by which we would verify their truth, do not appear to account for why what the women are saying is absurd (or funny). For, the joke of the skit is that even though we completely understand the
meanings
of their sentences, we cannot make heads or tails of what they are
saying
. As I mentioned above, the difference being drawn here is admittedly odd. Although I’ll not be able to make it look less odd, I think that I can make it a bit clearer.

For starters, then, imagine that we meet for coffee and you say, “Hello, good to see you,” and I extend out my hand, my eyes sort of wide open as I stare at it, and utter, “This is my hand.” Although you clearly understand the
meaning
of the sentence I just uttered (it isn’t as though I uttered, “Gobily gook muk not me fancy cakes”), my guess is that for all that you would nevertheless find my uttering “This is my hand” here a bit creepy. Rush Rhees has an answer as to why you would:

The distinction that Rhees is making, I think, is what I want to bring out: there is a difference between the meaning of a sentence (its sense) and what it makes sense to say. According to Rhees, this is the sort of shift that Wittgenstein makes when moving from his earlier to his later work. He is less interested in asking “What is the meaning of a sentence?” and more interested in asking “What is it to say something?” In uttering, “This is my hand,” you might think that I was simply offering a bit of trivial information. However, the more likely reaction to my behavior would be to quickly fish around for a context in which it would make sense for me to say, “This is my hand,” and say it so that it
wouldn’t
count as a piece of trivial information. For example, you might think to yourself: this idiot thinks that I think that he doesn’t have a hand. The point to stress here is that although the Verification Principle might work to account for the meaning of the sentence “This is my hand,” it does nothing to help us understand why uttering it in this context is so creepy.

Even when given reasons for the purchase of the piston engines, the reasons are strange. The strangeness, I think, stems from the fact that Mrs. Smoker’s answer to the question “Why did you buy that?”
is
connected in all the right ways to this question, though it cannot be accepted (by us) as an answer. For, given the cost of living, and the fact that these ladies are of the working-class (and so must spend their money wisely—this is why being working-class is significant here), one buys a piston engine only if one is in need of one. To be sure, that it would be on sale at the time one needed to purchase such a thing would be a matter of good fortune—one worthy of note. But, one doesn’t buy such a thing
simply
because it is a bargain! That the engines are gift-wrapped makes things even stranger. For, though one
might
buy a piston engine on sale knowing that one will most certainly need one in the near future, one wouldn’t normally go the extra step and have the thing gift-wrapped. And so, even granting that reason is
at work, the assumption doesn’t go very far in making the exchange between these women intelligible.

Wittgenstein in his later work seems to have abandoned the Verification Principle, which he claims to have never held in the first place. Now, why he would abandon something that he never held is itself a bit curious, but be that as it may, he appears to abandon it and introduces another: the Meaning-as-Use Principle.
²⁰
This principle says: “For a
large
class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” This could go far in helping explain away the worry about Mrs. Gorilla’s and Mrs. Smoker’s contradictory statements. For instance, we might say that it has become customary among these women to use a phrase of the form ‘No, . . . P’ when asked whether one has been P-ing. So, when Mrs. Non-Gorilla asks, “Been shopping?” the appropriate response (if one has in fact been shopping) is “No, . . . been shopping.” If this is the accepted form of response, then we might say that the sentence ‘No, . . . been shopping’ means “Yes, I’ve been shopping” or something like this. The phrase gets its meaning here by its being
used
to confirm that one has been shopping.