Late last night just before I went to bed I saw that, on one of the Monty Python fan pages on Facebook, someone had posted a link to the Military Fairy sketch, along with a comment like ‘How long before a snowflake takes offence at this?’ I didn’t react at the time, but of course that immediately struck me as staggeringly, breathtakingly ironic. The entire point of that hilarious sketch was to poke fun at the military; it was supposed to mock the martial status quo which had been present in Britain for the twenty years before it was broadcast. The irony is, whoever made the comment on the Facebook page obviously thought it was making fun of gay people, misinterpreting the sketch as somehow supporting their anti-woke, intolerant views when in fact it did precisely the opposite.

These days, more and more people seem to be claiming Monty Python and period comedies like it were right wing, anti-woke and politically incorrect. They say that they would never be allowed to air today, but that is a flagrant, deliberate misreading of what programs like Python were all about. As I wrote here, Python was left wing, not right wing; it was about poking fun at authority and the status quo, and everything that the right holds sacred. It irritates me that these reactionary morons now claim it as their own, using it as some kind of justification for intolerance. That totally warps what Monty Python was about, effectively hijacking to say exactly the opposite of what it was originally meant to. After All, the only people who would possibly offended by the Military Fairy sketch are the right wing nutcases to whom the army is above ridicule.