Monty Python and Philosophy by Gary Hardcastle (best novels for beginners .TXT) 📗

stoically convinced of the unlimited power of self-mastery, are confident that when they have imparted their cultural forms to lesser people, that’s all that can be done for our betterment.

Having borne the superior man’s burden, a Roman or a Briton may freely stare in incomprehension at the ridiculous behavior of his empire’s foreign subjects. Yes, the foreigners have silly beliefs and customs; it hardly matters. But let them misuse the mother tongue and, well, they’re in for a good thrashing. It is little known that the actual cause of the American Revolution was an intense desire on the part of the British to teach table manners to the colonists. Not the Battle of Yorktown but our utter incompetence at eating peas off the convex curve of a fork led the British to give up on civilizing us. We would have to improve ourselves after 1783.

But our superior masters, Roman or British, ask no more of us than they ask of themselves—not one of the Queen’s native subjects can possibly fail to see his own Latin teacher in Cleese’s centurion, nor fail to see himself in Brian’s own cowering submission to correction. Romanes eunt domus? I think not. A hundred times on the blackboard and no blood pudding. And of course, if Americans had anything like the British confidence of civilized superiority, they wouldn’t make such a fuss about being the greatest nation since 1066. Americans go on so much about it just because they know it isn’t true. Don’t be misled by a few simplified spellings, you self-appointed purveyors of American superiority. You know you love the Queen. You know you do. Praise Brian for the self-loathing Canadians. With them around at least Americans can feel superior to one other passel of British subjects. Now have some back bacon and return to your seat.

But there is more to it. One thing that is utterly lost on American audiences is how the Pythons use British class-consciousness as a continual source of contextual humor. Apart from the social situations themselves, the class consciousness is mainly conveyed by the various accents adopted by the Python characters, all the way from Terry Jones’s shrillest cockney up to John Cleese’s Oxbridge titter. It is no accident that the individual Pythons tend to occupy roles that cast them within the same class range of British society (with some small social mobility). But a lot of their posture towards all things British has to do with the re-enactment of their own class forms, made comic. It is the very rigidity of British class consciousness that creates the comic context.

And here we draw closer to the true secret that was revealed to me by God. The British understand the Romans so well because they built an empire to rival Rome’s own—not only by organizational genius, or an unfailing sense of what is and is not important, or by a perfect confidence in their own superiority, but also by sheer self-mastery and utter repression of all emotional weaknesses. So, four weapons. Five is right out. And the unexpected gift that accompanies these repressions is, surprisingly, an ability on the part of Romans and Britains to laugh at themselves. Americans simply don’t possess this capacity, at least not qua American. The British, like the Romans, are fascinated with how well they can mock themselves. Americans, lacking the needed detachment, become unconscious of their own pathos. The Americans may laugh at the British, but not at themselves, and which is the greater virtue? This is why Americans could never have built the empire they now enjoy at the beneficent noblesse oblige of their British cousins (shame that the French got that phrase when the British own the virtue). Americans do not want to suffer for the sake of imparting higher culture to a barbaric world. They want to make money and B movies and live in Florida. Only their own comfort, security and wealth moves them in any serious way. Yes, yes, democracy, freedom, things of that nature, but it’s not like we will hop in our boats and go off to create it (not really). The British and the Romans willingly ordered their societies in ways as repressive to themselves as to those they conquered for the sake of civilizing the world, and without a moment’s doubt that they were the ones to do it. But of course, this is funny, is it not, or more precisely, “comic”?

Are they able to laugh at themselves because their sense of superiority is so little threatened by seeing how comical it is? Or are they actually superior because they have always been able to laugh at themselves? This is too great a question. Neither God nor Brian has revealed this bit to me.

A Good Spanking

You may doubt that anyone, even a writer with a special revelation, could now tie together all this business about God being dead and the comic and politics and empire, but you underestimate the power of Brianic salvation. Your lack of faith is appalling. I should give you all a good spanking. Like an alien craft catching my fall from the tower of my own babbling, comes the saving stroke of an Italian pen.

The idea of laughter as blasphemy is nicely joined to its class context near the end of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a historical novel set in 1327. An old Spanish monk named Jorge, the librarian of a remote abbey, booby-traps the very last copy of Aristotle’s (now) lost treatise on comedy. Jorge is unable to bring himself to destroy the blasphemous book (he is a librarian after all), or allow anyone to read it (I always suspect librarians of secretly not trusting me with their books, and really wanting them all for themselves). Thus, he poisons the pages so that anyone will die from the sin of reading it. William of Baskerville, Eco’s protagonist, a sort of medieval Sherlock Holmes (and proper Englishman), asks the