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

ruin your cheer with their dreary pronouncements of Hellfire, with a thinly veiled confidence in the absolute truth of their own convictions (concealing an utterly unconscious fear that they may be wrong). Their confidence is difficult to distinguish from mere pride, but it is best not to judge, since, as Brian taught, you might get judged yourself if you do it. Better to laugh. They can’t do much about that—at least, not any more.

According to Henri Bergson, “the Comic” just is anything overly stiff that holds itself opposed to the flow of experience, and when its rigid bearing is noted by others, laughter results. The person who is “comic” has at least two very important characteristics. First is this mechanical inelasticity, this rigidity amid what should be a flowing present. Second, a “comic” person is invisible to himself as comic, does not realize he is being rigid. As Bergson says, “the comic person is unconscious. As though wearing the ring of Gyges with reverse effect, he becomes invisible to himself while remaining visible to all the world.”37 Hence, the art of the straight man affects sincerity, rigidity, unself-conscious pathos—and the Pythons, especially Chapman and Cleese, are among the best straight men comedy has ever produced. But for the pathetic follower of the dead God, comic rigidity is no affectation, it is a mode of existence. So the issue is not whether religious fundamentalists are utterly comic, the crux of the matter is whether anyone will point it out so that we can all laugh. But your soul is still in jeopardy, so don’t laugh yet.

We have more to say of rigidity and the comic, but please grant that it is far more difficult to be funny about things that are already funny, like the Pythons, because funny stuff isn’t rigid and comic. In such situations one needs recourse to the lower types of humor: puns, off-color jokes, ethnic slurs, or, at the very bottom rung, politics. We are not scrupulous people. Let’s do politics.

Romani Ite Domum

It is hard to be the only remaining super-power. One’s empire is always getting a bad rap. But there is no pleasing some people, as both Jesus and Brian taught. Bring people the aquaduct, sanitation, roads, medicine, education, order, peace, and even the public baths and good wine, and what do you get? Just complaints about little foibles that come along with it—a taste for ocelot spleens and jaguar’s earlobes, or blood pudding and Branston Pickle. British humor has a connection to Roman stoicism, for the humor works in inverse proportion to the degree in which the humorists’ culture is repressed: the more repressed the conquerors, the greater the comic possibilities, which is one reason why British humor seems almost surreal to the American ear (one can hardly be more repressed than the British). But get one thing straight: It’s their empire, not ours, even when we have temporary administrative responsibility.

On a recent trip to Britain I discovered to my (very American) dismay that the British are unimpressed with American wine. I was poking around in a good wine store in Oxford and finding little or nothing American to drink. I affected my best British accent (the secret is to speak without moving the upper lip, the rest takes care of itself, with some practice), and inquired after some wine from California. The clerk (pronounced “clark”) lilted back: “’aven’t got any; tried it once, can’t sell the stuff.” He had spam, though. I had thought they made some pretty good wine in California, and here it isn’t even taken seriously. And if you pour what the Brits know about wine-making into a thimble, it wouldn’t even be half empty. No matter. Obviously I am a colonist. Having worn out the bit about “taxation without representation,” I’m looking now for the headquarters of the American People’s Front. What have the lousy British ever done for us?

And here’s the lesson of empire. Empire takes mettle. It isn’t for nancies or pleasure-loving creatures of comfort like Australians and the Americans. Empire requires one weapon: organizational genius. And of course, an unfailing sense of what is and is not important. So the two weapons of empire are organizational genius and an unfailing sense of what is and is not important. And perfect confidence in one’s own superiority. So, the three weapons of empire are: organizational genius, an unfailing sense of what is and is not important, and a perfect confidence in one’s own superiority. I mean, nobody expects a perfect confidence in one’s own superiority. “Great race, the Romans,” says Michael Palin, hanging from the ceiling in chains the Romans granted him the privilege of wearing. But the same might be said of the British. It takes an astonishingly blithe attitude toward suffering (your own and other people’s) to keep hopping in your boats and invading every place you can even land, not to mention constantly having to spank (for their own good) the troublesome Dutch and French and Spanish who are without even the decency to bring British civilization to other lands. No, the Aussies and Yanks don’t have that in them.

To illustrate, it is far, far more important that Brian be made to conjugate his Latin correctly than that he be silenced from saying “Romans Go Home.” The true threat to empire is people who refuse to learn the lingua franca correctly. Was I not, after all, asking after American wine in the Queen’s own English? When in Rome. . . . History is a stubborn and harsh teacher. Right up to my own middle school years we were still learning, at the tip of a blade, to conjugate Latin. The language had been dead for five centuries. Now that’s an impressive cultural imperialism. People will be learning the Queen’s English everywhere for another two millennia, minimum. Some things come and go, some come and stay. Latin and English are of the latter sort. The Romans and the Britons, kindred spirits and