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

and acquaintances (whom, naturally, we hit up for chapters) were as intrigued with that question as we were. Now that we’ve assembled the book, however, we still won’t declare any simple, final theory about this connection. It remains somewhat mysterious. But thanks in no small part to our contributors, we understand much better why Monty Python and philosophy go together. It all starts with . . .

The Importance of Being British

Britain was a philosophical mecca for much of the twentieth century, especially the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, where the British Pythons studied in the 1960s. Here, too, philosophical superstars like Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A.J. Ayer, G.E. Moore, and Gilbert Ryle spent the first half of the twentieth century living, working, playing, and, apparently, threatening one another with pokers.1 (Gilliam, for the record, spent the 1960s at Occidental College in Southern California, which, as they say, explains a lot.) For better or worse, what gets taught in philosophy classrooms around the world to this very day derives from what these philosophers achieved at Oxford and Cambridge.

True, none of the Pythons specialized in philosophy. Chapman studied to be a physician, Cleese a barrister, Jones an historian, and so on.2 But they didn’t have to be philosophers to get a healthy dose of Russell, Wittgenstein, and the rest. The way these philosophers approached philosophical issues, leaning heavily on an analysis of the language in which philosophical problems were cast, was in the air and influenced nearly every region of the intellectual landscape. And thus it seeped, much like advertising, muzak, or spilt Tate & Lyle’s golden syrup, into so much of what the Pythons did.

That’s why we’re calling the first part of this volume Philosophical Aspects of Python. These chapters look at the ways in which particular Python sketches or films illustrate some issue or idea from philosophy. They differ in a number of ways, but they all take up a particular bit of Python and wring from it the philosophical content that we suspect is, more often than not, the vestige of an Oxbridge education, circa 1965. These chapters show what happens when twentieth-century philosophy gets run through a filter consisting of equal parts British music-hall tradition, 1960s-style anti-authoritarianism, and straightforward intelligence.

For Kevin Schilbrack, it’s Monty Python’s Life of Brian that serves as grist for the philosophical mill. His “‘Life’s a Piece of Shit’: Heresy, Humanism, and Heroism in Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (winner, incidentally, of the Award for Best Title in this Particular Volume, solely on the grounds of profanity and use of H’s) argues that Brian, the film’s hero, has existentialism written all over him (namely, the form of existentialism championed by Albert Camus (1913-1960)). Ten-year olds, and others similarly intrigued by the limits of the human digestive system, may want to turn immediately to Noël Carroll’s sensitive and delicate treatment of the wonderfully insensitive and indelicate Mr. Creosote. In “What Mr. Creosote Knows about Laughter,” Carroll finds an explanation for why we (well some of us, at least) find Mr. Creosote, from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, disgustingly funny rather than just plain disgusting. Enjoy the chapter with a wafer-thin after-dinner mint.

In “The Limits of Horatio’s Philosophy,” Kurt Smith takes up the delightfully absurd sketch “Piston Engine (a Bargain)” from Episode 43 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (titled “Hamlet”) and asks a simple but vexing question: What are these women, these pepperpots, saying? Smith’s answer leads us through the philosophical evolution of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), the Austrian philosophical luminary transplanted to Cambridge in the 1930s. Harry Brighouse’s contribution, “Why Is An Argument Clinic Less Silly than an Abuse Clinic or a Contradiction Clinic?,” makes use of the Python’s famous “Argument Clinic” sketch (originally in Episode 29 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “The Money Programme”) to illuminate how the political philosopher John Rawls (1926-2002) analyzed our beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of social practices and institutions. Far from being a ridiculous scenario, Brighouse suggests, a real argument clinic could serve a genuine and much-needed social function.

Taking us back to Brian (Cohen, that is), Randall Auxier makes an offer that you don’t see everyday, at least not in a book of relatively serious philosophy. Auxier is willing to save your soul, both mortal and immortal, by way of the heroic anti-hero of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Sound good? Do be warned: the salvation involves a dose of Nietzsche, a smidgen of Pascal, and a heads-on confrontation with the evidence we have, or lack, that God is British. Rebecca Housel’s “Monty Python and The Holy Grail: Philosophy, Gender, and Society,” on the other hand, invites us to view Monty Python and the Holy Grail from the dual perspectives of Arthurian legend and feminist ethics. Amidst the humor, Housel argues, are serious and intriguing philosophical and ethical undertones. Stephen Asma’s chapter, “Against Transcendentalism: The Meaning of Life and Buddhism,” explores the recurring themes of dehumanization in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and links these to a deeper dualistic framework embedded in many religions. In the end, Asma argues, the film leads us to something completely different (naturally): the Buddhist value of mindfulness. Stephen Erickson’s “Is There Life After Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life?” then offers a critique of the idea that life is a journey, its meaning somehow tied up with the journey’s destination. Erickson sees the Pythons unwittingly reducing that notion to absurdity as they offer a more compelling alternative, a view Erickson calls “comedic eliminativism.”

What, That’s Not Enough for You?

Okay. On then to the second part, Aspects of Pythonic Philosophy. Here the chapters focus not on a particular sketch or film but rather on a particular philosophical topic or idea—one that connects to several different Monty Python sketches or scenes. If you’ve come to this book looking for a particular philosophical topic (as opposed to a particular bit of Python), this is the section for you. Leading it off is Stephen Faison’s chapter, “God