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

one might come to the conclusion that the world is incoherent or absurd, such that one can find no meaning or values in it.

In their last movie, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, this possibility is mentioned explicitly in the infamous “Live Organ Transplants” skit: reflecting on Eric Idle’s song about the vastness of the universe, Mrs. Bloke (Terry Jones) comments, “Makes you feel so sort of insignificant, doesn’t it?”

One might wonder, since this movie is their final group effort, whether Mrs. Bloke’s line represents the final judgment of Monty Python concerning the “meaning of life.” Do they really believe that life is insignificant? In short, are the Pythons a band of nihilists who believe in nothing, perhaps simply making a joke at the expense of the average, non-philosophical viewer, who believes that life does have a meaning? Are they really, deep-down, a bunch of skeptical, left-leaning, intellectual agitators who enjoy undermining the common beliefs and values of ordinary, law-abiding citizens? Are they just a horde of snooty, namby-pamby, pinot noir sipping, Foucault-reading, moral anarchists?! A depraved pack of pseudo-intellectuals who would rather sit on their pampered posteriors while engaging in pretentious, limp-wristed, academically-questionable pursuits, taking time off only to hurl insults at decent hard-working folk?!

Oh, excuse me! I got carried away there for a bit. Actually, though some of these last accusations might be true (at least the wine drinking, in John Cleese’s case), Monty Python does, in fact, have a positive message about the meaning of life. Well, sort of: the message is existentialist. And, in order to better understand the existentialist content of Monty Python, we will need to examine some of the major ideas of existentialist philosophy.

Although its origins can be traced to the nineteenth century, existentialism is principally a twentieth-century philosophy. And, like the twentieth century itself, existentialist philosophy is a strange mix of diverse views, trends, and attitudes. One often finds, for instance, a dictionary definition of existentialism that simply groups a host of themes: “the individual, the experience of choice, and the absence of rational understanding of the universe with a consequent dread or sense of absurdity in human life.”71 Given such a broad description, the problem of relating Monty Python to existentialism is not the shortage of analogies or similarities between the two, but the exact opposite; what Monty Python skit does not bring up the individual, our experience of choice, and, in particular, the absurdity of human life?

So, in what follows, we will limit our investigation of existentialism in Monty Python to a few influential representatives of existentialist philosophy and literature. In the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre, there are number of intriguing parallels and similarities with general themes in Monty Python, as well as potential criticisms or comments on the plausibility of their various philosophies. In fact, since existentialism was one of the most influential and important philosophies of the twentieth century, and is still enormously popular in the arts and general culture, it would be surprising if Monty Python did not have something existentialist to say.

Kafka, Camus, and the “Absurd”

There’s a difference between the influence of existentialist philosophy in Monty Python and the influence of existentialist literature. Since existentialism pervades much of twentieth-century literature, we shouldn’t be surprised to find its influence in Monty Python. And, indeed, if one were to look for existentialist literary influences, an obvious source would be the stories and novels of the greatest author of existentialist fiction, the German-Czech, Franz Kafka (1883-1924).

The chaotic and nonsensical world portrayed in Kafka’s writings bears an uncanny resemblance to much in Monty Python. Kafka’s worlds are often a sort of institutionalized or bureaucratic insanity: worlds that put up impossible, illogical barriers to the lives or progress of the main characters. A well-known parable by Kafka, “Couriers,” nicely demonstrates these qualities:

They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other—since there are no kings—messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.72

Often, the protagonists in Kafka’s stories are ordinary people who strive to overcome these irrational barriers by using common sense and reason. But, no matter how hard they try, the walls of their unfathomable maze inevitably close in upon them, leading to gradual frustration and anxiety. And it hardly helps that the bureaucratic members who enforce these insane rules and regulations act as if their crazy systems are the very epitome of rational thought and justice!

Similar situations constantly arise in Monty Python. Many of the famous skits from Monty Python’s Flying Circus involve an ordinary, or somewhat silly, customer who cannot overcome the ridiculous barriers set up by a shop owner who doesn’t see the insanity in his rules or regulations. For example, the “Cheese Shop” (Episode 33, untitled) depicts a sustained, but ultimately fruitless (or cheeseless), search for cheese in a cheese shop. The “Dead Parrot” sketch (Episode 8, “Full Frontal Nudity”) involves a customer’s equally futile attempt to convince the shopkeeper of a pet store that his recently purchased parrot is dead.

As with Monty Python, furthermore, one of the strangely entertaining aspects of Kafka’s stories is their “black humor.” The cruel predicament that the main characters experience is, to some extent, comic. One often finds oneself both laughing and wincing at the same time in both Kafka and Monty Python. In Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” for example, when the anxious salesman, Gregor Samsa, awakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect, he seems more horrified about having missed his train to work! In a genuinely Pythonesque moment, he reasons that he might still be able to catch the seven o’clock train, but “to catch that he would need to hurry like mad and his [product]