Monty Python and Philosophy, Gary Hardcastle [portable ebook reader TXT] 📗

I, Scene V? What are they to make of it? (That these women recite the play is surely connected to the fact that the episode is centered around Hamlet. Even so, knowing this will not answer the questions that I want to raise below.)

One wonders whether in the end it is best to accept the absurdity, as Mrs. Smoker and Mrs. Non-Smoker seem to do when they walk away, and laugh. For my part, I like this option. But, the editors of this book tell me that I had better opt for making something else of such skits. To clinch the deal, they recently sent out email letting contributors know that if the book were to sell, and I mean sell big, each author of a chapter would receive a couple of hundred bucks. That was certainly enough to motivate me to make something of the piston engine skit. What I am to make of it exactly, of course, is the rub.

I am a scholar of early modern philosophy by trade, or at least this is what I tell family, friends, students, and of late, police officers. Originally for this book I had worked up a scholarly piece on an eighteenth-century theory of humor, wit, raillery, satire, and ridicule, written by the British economist Corbyn Morris.15 The idea behind the essay was to take a bunch of Monty Python skits set in the eighteenth century and apply Morris’s theory. The theory, of course, would tell us whether Monty Python was funny—at least, whether the skits would have been considered funny by eighteenth-century standards. I was secretly hoping that the theory would not find the skits to be funny, in which case I would be able to spin the piece as a study of comical irony. But, alas, an application of the theory showed that the goddamned pieces would have been a smashing success, as the Brits would put it. So, there went the irony angle.

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:

Annoyed by the rude and abusive language of The Vision of the Golden Rump . . . Walpole was able to persuade them to pass the 1737 Licensing Act. In future all new plays and any alteration to old ones had to be sent to the Lord Chamberlain for approval, and playhouses were restricted to the City of Westminster. Other theatres needed parliamentary sanction, which enabled Walpole to shut down the most troublesome.16

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 infamous insults there [in the theaters] offered upon all Decency, cried aloud for a Remedy.—For these profligate Attacks made Impressions more deep and venomous than Writings; As they were not fairly addressed to the Judgment, but immediately to the Sight and the Passions; for were they capable of being answered again, but by erecting an opposite Stage of Scurrility. (Morris, p. x)

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