comedy

People Still Don’t Understand Python

It looks like I have once again wandered into a quagmire, albeit an interesting one. Earlier on one of the Monty Python fan groups I keep an eye on, I came across a post essentially saying that comedians had a right to cause offence and it should have no taboos. I, of course, took umbrage at that, as it would mean people could justify discriminating against or offending whoever they wanted under the guise of comedy. That was manifestly not what Python was about: those guys wanted to expose the absurdities of British culture, among other things, not poke fun at or belittle those who could not fight back. As I think I’ve said here before, the fact that Monty Python is now increasingly being invoked as some sort of anti-woke, anti-PC bastion, and used to justify persecution and mockery, is to fundamentally misrepresent it.

However, one of the replies I got cited a film called Blazing Saddles. I had never seen it, so of course I looked it up. What I found was, at first glance, abhorrent: a trailer for some kind of 1970s western ‘comedy’, crammed with shockingly racist language. It looked appalling, so at that I went on my afternoon trundle. Coming back though, I naturally decided to dig a little deeper, and this time found something far more interesting. For example, this Guardian article from January argues that, far from being racist, Blazing Saddles is a satire on contemporary American culture. “Westerns were white American. Certainly, the earliest examples are propagandist. No other culture mythologises its own creation in such a cinematic way. One tried and tested western blueprint is the tale of the great white saviour bringing the savage land to heel. Blazing Saddles turns this formula on its head….What transpires is a torch shone on racist, sexist and bigoted attitudes which absolutely captures the mood and prejudice of the time. Those attitudes still exist.”

Thus, like Python, rather than defending bigotry, Blazing Saddles apparently reveals it’s idiocy. I obviously need to watch it before commenting on it further; yet the fact that it, like Monty Python, is now being invoked as a justification for discrimination still does not sit well with me. People now seem to think they can use whatever derogatory or discriminatory language they want under the guise of humour, and to speak against them is to just not get the joke. Not only does that completely misunderstand the nature of comedy, but it leads us down a very dark, dangerous rabbit hole in which persecution and bullying become acceptable. That is obviously not what the guys behind Python or any other great comedians wanted.

Yet perhaps what is most interesting is how such misunderstandings expose people’s underlying ignorance in a way they wouldn’t have intended. If Blazing Saddles was about shining a light on American racism, the way in which these people have so disgustingly misread it exposes them as the ignorant, barely literate racists they are.

Monty Python Is Being Misread

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.