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

of approaching the meaning of life, within which earnestness, sacrifice, and suffering are the pious pathways to premium seats at the “Heavenly Concert,” the greatest show off earth. The Pythons saw this Christian approach as not only numbing, but misdirected, and their humor helped dislodge it from its place in human life. Even if it were true, they felt, it needn’t be so priggish and pious.

As with much Python humor, the Pythons made the point by juxtaposing desperately high stakes—life’s very meaning—against the silly, narrow-minded, squalid people purporting to institutionalize this meaning and dispense it to the assembled membership. So we have for example the British headmaster in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, John Cleese’s Humphrey Williams, making the following announcement to his young male students in a late-nineteenth-century British (and, correspondingly, Christian) boarding school:

Now, two boys have been found rubbing linseed oil into the school cormorant. Now, some of you may feel that the cormorant does not play an important part in the life of the school, but I would remind you that it was presented to us by the Corporation of the town of Sudbury to commemorate Empire Day, when we try to remember the names of all those from the Sudbury area who so gallantly gave their lives to keep China British. So, from now on, the cormorant is strictly out of bounds! Oh, and Jenkins, apparently your mother died this morning.

This is dark humor at its best, making us simultaneously gasp, wince, and laugh. Its point, of course, is that little Jenkins’s church (of a piece, as it is, with his school), the institution charged with comforting Jenkins in what will be one of the most difficult times of his life—charged, in fact, with providing his life, and his mothers’, with a meaning sufficient for Jenkins to continue his life—has less concern for his emotional needs than it has for the school’s (apparently wooden) cormorant. So much for this institution as a guide to the meaning of life.

But the Python critique goes deeper, to a critique of this axial approach to the meaning of life itself, the approach that regards the meaning of life as a journey to some destination. It’s worth reminding ourselves that Monty Python emerged with, and hastened along, what was at the time called “the countercultural revolution.” To what culture was it counter? “Mainstream” is a very insufficient answer to this question. The counterculture (more recently termed “postmodernism”) sought to break down hierarchies and reverse traditional priorities. The Pythons fit this agenda almost as if they invented it on their own. The “spiritually” high and mighty, particularly the pompous, were parodied, especially if they had little to offer beyond platitudes they did not live by. And an audience of quite ordinary people, the supposed sheep of the flocks, were laughed into seeing the institutions around them, especially the supposed “meaning purveyors,” as silly or empty, or hilariously both.

Amidst very serious political issues, matters of sexual liberation, and the unencumbered pursuit of experiences, then, a metaphysical revolution had been underway as well. Its enemy, in fact, was the axial way of understanding the meaning of life: life as a journey, more a pilgrimage, in which here does not matter as much as there, and now does not matter as much as some upcoming then. This journey suggested—no, mandated—targeted travel, thus conjuring the notion of postponements and delays requiring discipline and restraint, strict itineraries, painful detours and fixed resting places. Exceptional patience, along with the ability to read and obey a map, would be needed. One ought always to be in purposive transit, monitored from lowest position in the company, organization, or institution, so to speak, to its highest executive rank: chairman of the “bored.” And who could not fail to become stilted and bored, having to go through all the rigmarole—a favorite target for Python spoof—to get to the top, to membership on the oh-so-privileged board, in the first place? Since there was said to be no salvation outside of the company, there could be no escape, no exit from earnestness, in any case. Such was the burden imposed by an axial reading of the meaning of life.

As part of the counterculture, Monty Python helped break down mystifying hierarchies and eliminate a culture of deference. It was now okay to fart in church. The service stank anyway, and the bishop was no better positioned, knew no more than anyone else. What mattered was not getting to the pearly gates on time but being here now and enjoying unrestricted explorations. And who was to say anyway that any one thing was more fulfilling than any other?

It would not be ridiculous to say that the meaning of life is simply to enjoy this life we have. After all, lots of fun and funny things, interesting experiences and adventures, happen during it. Seriousness about life, on the other hand, can make it far less enjoyable and make us susceptible to tunnel-vision and even a little boring. A good argument might be presented that we should just live our lives, hopefully be able to live them up, and not think too much about any destination or purpose. It’s one thing to strategize for more money and thereby more of the “good things of life,” but it’s another to brood and brood over “what it all means.”

Death and (the Meaning of) Life

Consider the fish swimming in the tank at the beginning of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Among other things, they note their fellow fish, Howard, being eaten outside of the tank. But they make no connection between that event and their own likely fates, and they wonder, casually if not benightedly, what life is all about. Have they missed something? Have we?

Considerations of death provide an alternate account of the meaning of life. There are, of course, at least two ways to regard death. It can be an event that happens (mostly to others) at some indeterminate time or