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

then, is to be done? I daresay the answer is obvious. We must boycott all these avenues and institutions that have so far promoted this popularization, and we must begin with Monty Python. This means a number of things. First, of course, we must simply assert ourselves. Let us prove that we do indeed exist [cheers from audience] and that we must be taken seriously by the philosophical establishment!

That’s the easy part. Much harder, I fear—though not impossible, let’s hope—is the task of refuting or at least obscuring this notion that Monty Python has anything philosophically interesting or genuine to say. Now, in this case, we can kill two emus with one stone [cheers and laughter from audience] simply by organizing ourselves and like-minded (that is, real) philosophers and publishing our own book—say, something like, Real Philosophy Is Not Popular Philosophy—in which we can illuminate the pitfalls of the current fashions.

Indeed, that is what I’ve begun to do in my talk today. Of course, here I am preaching to the converted. So what I shall do—and I implore you all to join me—is send round my essays and papers to publishers in hopes that at least one is not yet intoxicated with this blasted popularization business. I am quite serious that with the right kind of organization and a publication or two we may inaugurate, really, a movement for the depopularization of philosophy. [Cheers and commotion in audience]

I see that beer and fresh meat are being brought in now, so if you’ll all just calm down for yet another minute while I . . . [inaudible above cheering and commotion in audience]. Alright, thank you. I’m almost done here, so . . . just quickly . . . I, I think the most important thing, as each of us plays our role in this anti-popularization movement, is to downplay the popularity of Monty Python itself. Really, unless it’s absolutely necessary, we must not even mention Monty Python in these efforts and obviously not take part in projects or books or conferences that take these mere entertainers seriously as philosophers, popular or unpopular—of any kind at all. [More cheers and calls for food] Alright, then. Let’s have a drink!

20

My Years with Monty Python, or, What’s So Funny About Language, Truth, and Analyticity?

GARY L. HARDCASTLE

And though a philosopher may live remote from business, the genius of philosophy, if carefully cultivated by several, must gradually diffuse itself throughout the whole society, and bestow a similar correctness on every art and calling.

—David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, §1

Philosophy [is] on the whole no laughing matter.

—W.V. Quine, Quiddities, Preface

Here’s a true story. In the early 1990s, as a junior philosophy professor, I was invited to talk to the undergraduate philosophy club at the university where I had recently been hired. I accepted of course, and I even offered a rather promising title: “Themes in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy as Reflected in the Work of Monty Python.” That title—inspired by a nervous joke we traded back and forth in graduate school, that the dissertations we were all laboring on, each an example of the painstaking conceptual analysis for which analytic philosophy was named, were in fact on the philosophy of Monty Python—showed up almost immediately on flyers around campus, above a date, time, place, and—in large letters—my name. One got the distinct impression that I would give the talk by that name.

Now, I had the title, but not what one might call “the actual talk.” If we are going to talk in actualities, I didn’t even have an actual idea for the actual talk beyond that suggested by the actual title. It was entirely conceivable (in fact I could conceive it, clearly and distinctly) that I would be introduced and then, at the podium, proceed to repeat that title in various formulations until, somehow, fifty minutes passed. “Well, then [ponder] . . . what are the themes of contemporary philosophy, and [long ponder] . . . how . . . are they analytic? And what is it to reflect these things I have suggested we call [extended ponder] . . . themes [medium ponder] . . . in Monty Python? [extended drink of water]” That would be a passable Monty Python skit but terrible philosophy and, more importantly, an altogether disastrous introduction of me and my work to my new colleagues and students. I had to do something, well, completely different.

As the day approached I staved off panic and thought about it. I needed to show some clips from Monty Python; I had enough sense to know that putting ‘Monty Python’ in the title and then not showing clips from Monty Python would lead the several dozen Python fans in attendance to stone me (though they would don fake beards and unusually low voices for the stoning, a charming but ultimately insufficient consolation). But I also had to say something sensibly philosophical. As we put it in the philosophy biz, I had to do some philosophy. It was, after all, a philosophy club, and I a philosopher.

So I sat down a full two days before the talk and . . . well, I don’t know how to put this, but . . . it all came together. In fact, it all came together wonderfully. I had on the one hand the memory of my favorite Python skits and movies (which at that time included a few dozen episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl, and portions of Monty Python and the Holy Grail ). And, on the other, I had my particular take on the themes of analytic philosophy, which amounted to some very general notions about language, rationality, and philosophy itself. And, lo and behold, many of those skits really did reflect, somehow, many of those themes.118

In “International Philosophy,” for example, a football team of German philosophers (“led by their skipper ‘Nobby’ Hegel,” the announcer