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

hand.” After all, Moore asserted it in all seriousness when doing philosophy. From our current perspective, we can see this “special scenario” in which the claim makes sense: as a philosopher, Moore is doing something like stand-up comedy. The standard rules of sense-making in the world are altered or suspended because we are in the realm of comedy. Here is the place at which the subversiveness of Monty Python’s humor comes to the fore: If philosophy is bad, unconscious comedy, then the philosopher seeks to make the world itself into the setting of his comedy. But, in skits like the hijacking skit, we discover that people who engage in the world in the ways philosophers claim to do not live in our world, and their actions in their worlds render those worlds less comprehensible to us than is our world. The search for clarity and precision that is the stock in trade for philosophers makes the world harder to engage in and more opaque. On this view, Monty Python provides a potent argument by example against (analytic) philosophy. Philosophical engagement with the world makes of the world simply the setting for a joke. It would be better for philosophers to recognize that they are engaged in comedy and to reveal something about the nature of the world through self-conscious construction of comedic scenarios.

Wittgenstein wished in his philosophy to show “the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” Philosophers have puzzled over this Wittgensteinian “philosophical therapy.” I suggest the following: One most misunderstands comedy if one believes that one must come to a peculiar and deep understanding of something in order to find it humorous. Rather, finding something humorous might in itself be an expression of the highest understanding you could have of it. (Don’t try to find the circumstances in which “I know this is my hand” makes sense; you best understand the specialness of that claim when you see that it makes sense only as a joke.) The peculiar intellectual and affective pleasure of the bizarre is the highest philosophical understanding you can have of the structure of our lives. The paralytic nature of attempting to get to the bottom of things in the world (like the Cardinals of the Spanish Inquisition episode (Episode 15, “The Spanish Inquisition”) who try over and over to express precisely the nature of the Inquisition) should be replaced by the pleasure of understanding ourselves outside the world of that skit and in a world in which the hijacker and his striving for precision are nothing more than a joke. A philosophy that reaches self-consciousness is a philosophy that simply becomes humor. In our world, that is philosophy enough.

Coda

A question has been raised as to whether I believe what I have said here. In response I offer this:

A nun walks into a bar and the bartender says: “So, what is this, a joke?”

Do you believe it? However you answer that question, I answer the first one the same way.105

18

Monty Python’s Utterly Devastating Critique of Ordinary Language Philosophy

GEORGE A. REISCH

It would have been fascinating to be a fly on a wall (even in a bottle) near those philosophers who had watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus on November 9th, 1972. In that night’s episode, Michael Palin portrayed the host of a television program titled, The Bols Story: The Story of Holland’s Most Famous Aperitif.

As soon as Palin introduces the program’s topic, he becomes mired in precise linguistic analysis:

Good evening. Tonight we’re going to talk about, that is, I’m going to talk about, well, actually, I’m talking about it now. [pauses and laughs nervously]. Well, I’m not talking about it now, but I am talking.106

By the time he reaches his fourth word, “we’re,” Palin is derailed. The problem is that there is no “we” who will be talking. Rather, viewers at home will be listening. He alone will be doing all the talking. And is it true that Palin is going to talk about a subject (in a moment or two), or is he in fact already talking about it? No, he decides, he’s not talking about it yet, but he is talking.

But what, precisely, does talking consist in? There is room for confusion, here, too:

I know I’m pausing occasionally and not talking during the pauses but the pauses are part of the whole process of talking. [pauses and chuckles] When one talks one has to pause. [pauses] Like that. I paused, but I was still talking. [pauses] And again there!

So, the initial assertion, now qualified to mean, “Good evening, tonight I will in a moment or two be talking about . . .” must be further specified as, “Good evening, tonight, except for when I am pausing, I will be in a moment or two talking about . . . ” This qualification is important, after all, for viewers may misinterpret these pauses not as integral parts of the “whole process of talking” but as something else. Palin continues,

No, the real point of what I’m saying is that when I appear not to be talking don’t go nipping out to the kitchen, putting the kettle on, buttering scones or getting crumbs and bits of food out of those round, brown straw mats that the teapot goes on, you know. Because in all probability, I’m still talking and what you heard was a pause. [pauses] Like there again!

Now that this ambiguity and its potential dangers have been identified, we need some procedure to distinguish the two cases. Palin knows just the thing:

Look, to make it absolutely easier so that there’s no problem at all, what I’ll do is I’ll give you some kind of sign, like this [he uncurls his arm toward the camera, as if he’s presenting to us something in his palm] when I’m still talking and only pausing in between words. And when I’ve finished altogether I’ll do this. [He folds his arms.] Alright?

No, it’s not alright. Any discussion about words or gestures must