In some ways, however, the picture is even worse. The song that begins the film (also called “The Meaning of Life”) poses a question that has troubled many people since the modern synthesis combined Darwin’s evolutionary theory with the understanding of our genetic code: “[A]re we just simply spiraling coils of self-replicating DNA?” Our drives and goals and hopes and dreams may all just be products of evolution. Our very sense of purposiveness—our sense that there is something worth pursuing—may itself be a product of evolution. An animal that is not driven to pursue goals will not reproduce, and so will not leave descendents. But the goals themselves have no greater significance.
The threat of nihilism, then, is quite real, and is perhaps the most pervasive theme in the work of the Pythons. Part of their response is to revel in the absurdity—think of the scene in the middle of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, in which several bizarre characters try to “Find the Fish,” with shouts of encouragement from the audience. Throughout all stages of their work, the Pythons take a gleeful pleasure in the collapse of meaning and the limitations of human institutions.
But the Pythons have another response to the challenge of nihilism as well. At the end of the film, suddenly and unexpectedly, the meaning of life is revealed: “try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.” While this line is presented in a very nonchalant fashion and is immediately buried in a series of jokes about censors and modern audiences, it bears closer scrutiny. This is pretty sound advice for living a good life. Take care of yourself, be sure to continue learning and growing, be decent to other people as individuals and be tolerant of others as members of groups.
A person following this advice could recognize the limitations of the marketplace while also recognizing the contributions it can make for overall happiness. While she might not find a glorious quest to participate in, she would have appropriate grounds for developing a virtuous character in the context of her cultural tradition. Although her religion cannot provide her with simple rules to follow blindly, she can draw on it reflectively to develop a set of rules that she can autonomously endorse. Finally, and above all, by keeping a sense of humor, she can cope with the threat of nihilism and the challenges of the scientific picture of the world while leading a worthwhile and meaningful life.
14
Existentialism in Monty Python: Kafka, Camus, Nietzsche, and Sartre
EDWARD SLOWIK
Unlike any other comedy troupe, Monty Python presents its viewers with a bizarre, unpredictable, and seemingly meaningless world. If one were to try and locate a philosophical message in the shows, recordings, and movies of Monty Python, 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] sample weren’t even packed up, and he himself wasn’t feeling particularly fresh and active.”73
Among the writers who have been influenced by Kafka, one of the most important is the French existentialist, Albert Camus (1913-1960). Not only did Camus write influential existentialist literature (most notably, the novel, The Stranger), but he also wrote a number of essays on the meaning of life that seem directly inspired by Kafka’s vision of a meaningless world. Camus famously defined the “absurd” as the confrontation between a rational person and an indifferent universe, and his use of the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus has become a famous metaphor for this confrontation: “The gods have condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight.”74 The punishment, as Camus goes on to describe, is a “futile and hopeless labor,” a pointless task that never can be completed. As soon as the rock reaches the top, it rolls down again, and Sisyphus must start the whole process once more, without any hope of completing his ultimate task of placing the rock on the mountain peak.
For Camus, Sisyphus’s fate reveals the long-term or overall meaning of our own lives. Like Sisyphus, we are “condemned” to a life of tasks and projects that seemingly don’t amount to any real, lasting worth or value. We go to work each day, raise our families, and eventually die. And the whole process starts over again with the next generation, an endless cycle that apparently has no ultimate goal or point. This is the problem of the meaning of life as understood by the existentialists.
There are no direct references to Camus or the myth of Sisyphus, but the often repetitive triviality of life is nicely captured in several reccurring characters or stereotypes in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. My favorite examples include the tedium of an office worker’s existence, depicted in the aptly named “Dull Life of a City Stockbroker” sketch (Episode 6, untitled), where the joke is that adventure actually occurs all around the stockbroker without his noticing, or the chartered accountant who desires to become a lion-tamer (Episode 10, untitled). These characters share Sisyphus’s fate, although without Sisyphus’s defiance or heroism. The boring monotony of their occupations mirrors the boring monotony of their lives (which were, apparently, of interest to Michael Palin, who plays nearly all of them). The philosophically-inclined viewer may forever after view chartered accountancy as symbolic of the ultimate lack of significance of a person’s life, especially for individuals within our modern, regimented, industrial societies.
The Individual and the Meaning of Life
One might be tempted to counter Camus’s interpretation of life by inviting religion, society, or some great philosophical theory to rescue some meaning from our seemingly meaningless lives. For instance, someone might declare that God, or our nation, provides an overall meaning for our day-to-day existence, since our lives gain a meaning by being part of a divine plan or a larger process.
Yet the existentialists were for the most part very skeptical of the use of any higher “being” or universal plan to find meaning. The great German existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) famously declared that “God is dead,” by which he meant that the modern scientific world had made belief in God no longer acceptable to the rational person, and so our purpose in life couldn’t come from a supernatural source. But the problem can also be stated more generally: What provides the meaning of these larger entities, like God or the State? If the answer is that God or the State provide their own meaning, such that nothing else is required to give them meaning, then why couldn’t our individual lives be just as meaningful all by themselves (and thus nothing else, like God or the State, would be required to give our own lives meaning, too)?
All told, one of the most important themes in existentialism is the fate of the individual in acquiring his or her own answer to the meaning to life. Camus called this quest, “living without appeal.” It can be understood as a rejection of the quick and easy answers that our societies, religions, and philosophies often use to resolve our existential worries. The celebrated French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) made the same point when he declared that our “existence precedes our essence.” We are not born with a pre-established essence (a definition, purpose, or goal) provided by some higher power or institution; rather, we must provide our own, freely-chosen purpose to life. We exist first, and we must then determine our meaning or essence.
This individual-centered component of existentialism is strongly endorsed by Monty Python, particularly in a well-known scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. In an attempt to dissuade a horde of would-be disciples, Brian argues:Look . . . you’ve got it all wrong. You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals.
The importance of this scene cannot be overemphasized in attempting to locate an existential message—or indeed any philosophical message—in Monty Python. It is without a doubt one of their rare moments of open and direct expression of a philosophical idea, although it fits naturally into the plot and scene. The Monty Python members have repeatedly stated that Monty Python’s Life of Brian is one of their finest achievements due to its consistent theme—and the theme, of course, is the (existentialist) plea for a little “critical thinking” on the part of the individual. In various interviews, they have made the following comments on the film’s message:JOHN CLEESE: One of the themes of the film is, “Do make up your own mind about things and don’t do what people tell you.” And I find it slightly funny that there are now [1979] religious organizations saying, “Do not go and see this film that tells you not to do what you are told.”75
MICHAEL PALIN: There’s a real feeling that we’d moved up a notch with Life of Brian. It was taking on something that could be difficult and controversial, but essentially dealt with all sorts of things that were right at the basis of what Python comedy was all about, which is really resisting people telling you how to behave and how not to behave. It was the freedom of the individual, a very sixties thing, the independence which was part of the way Python had been formed. . . .76
Nietzsche too warned of the negative effects of most (if not all) social institutions, traditions, and customs, on the development and freedom of the individual. With respect to morality, he argued:The free human being is [judged] immoral because in all things he is determined to depend upon himself and not upon a [moral] tradition. . . . [I]f an action is performed not because tradition commands it but for other motives (because of its usefulness to the individual, for example), even indeed for precisely the motives which once founded the tradition, it is called immoral and it is felt to be so by him who performed it.77
Nietzsche’s analysis of moral traditions even helps to explain why Monty Python’s Life of Brian aroused so much anger among certain religious groups, Christians especially. At some point in the development of the traditions of many religious societies, it became unacceptable to philosophically investigate (or make a comedy about) religion—even though one of Jesus’s main goals was to get people to re-think their religious commitments and values.
Moreover, the Pythons have repeatedly claimed that they were not poking fun at Jesus in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but rather at the social mov
ements that were, and still are, formed to interpret Jesus’s teachings. As Terry Jones put it later:[Monty Python’s Life of Brian is] very critical of the Church, and I think that’s what the joke of it is, really: to say, here is Christ saying all of these wonderful things about people living together in peace and love, and then for the next two thousand years people are putting each other to death in His name because they can’t agree on how He said it, or in what order He said it. The whole thing about “The sandal” [the followers of the Gourd or the Shoe] . . . is like a history of the Church in three minutes.78
Religious groups and movements, like all social groups, have all too often become dogmatic and rigid, inhibiting the individual’s exploration of the religion (quite aside from the obvious fact, mentioned above, that these religious groups constantly inhibit each other by way of verbal and physical attack). Nietzsche made many similar criticisms of Christianity. While he admired much of the teachings of Jesus (since Jesus approached morality in a thoughtful and individual way), Nietzsche was very critical of the many followers, most notably Paul, who converted the parables and sayings of Jesus into a “religion,” with all of the “dos” and “don’ts” common to religions.
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