Monty Python and Philosophy

by Gary L. Hardcastle

  2 Though one gets the impression Cleese might well study philosophy if he had it all to do over again, given that philosophy has become one of his main post-Python interests. Concerned about the meager attention accorded philosophical questions in contemporary life, for example, in 2002 Cleese recorded a well-received set of radio “blurbs” on philosophical topics for the American Philosophical Association (see www.udel.apa.edu). He’s also shared the stage repeatedly with Pomona University’s E. Wilson Lyon Professor of Humanities Stephen Erickson in public discussions of the meaning of life (the topic, not the film) and, from 1999 to 2005, was A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University where he lectured on, among other things, philosophy and religion.

  3 David Hume, “Of Miracles,” in his Writings on Religion, edited by Antony Flew (Chicago: Open Court, 1992), p. 73.

  4 Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, with Bob McCabe, The Pythons’ Autobiography (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2003), p. 281.

  5 Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” in Kant, On History, edited by Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 3.

  6 Similarly, if Brian is an existentialist, he might be either a religious or theistic existentialist (like Kierkegaard, Martin Buber (1878-1965), or Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973)) or an atheistic existentialist (like Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Albert Camus (1913-1960)).

  7 Theistic humanism rather than secular humanism is a common theme in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Here God is portrayed as criticizing religious believers who devalue their humanity, as in this dialogue:GOD: What are you doing now?

  KING ARTHUR: Averting our eyes, oh Lord.

  GOD: Well, don’t. It’s just like those miserable psalms, always so depressing. . . . Every time I try to talk to someone it’s “sorry this” and “forgive me that” and “I’m not worthy”. . . .

  8 Bob Lane, “The Absurd Hero,” Humanist in Canada 17:4 (Winter, 1984-85).

  9 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1955), p. 90.

  10 Albert Camus, Preface to L’Étranger, edited by Germaine Brée (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955).

  11 Robert C. Solomon, “Camus’ L’Étranger, and the Truth,” in his From Hegel to Existentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 246-260.

  12 The Pythons with Bob McCabe, The Pythons: Autobiography by the Pythons (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), p. 326.

  13 The ensuing account of horror derives from Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror (New York: Routledge, 1990), especially the first chapter. For further background on comic amusement, see my article, “Humour,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, edited by Jerrold Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 344-365.

  14 It may seem that this does not apply to a great deal of black comedy. In many instances the cruelties dealt in black humor do not appear to be directed at objects that morally deserve such punishment. Think of such genres of dark humor as dead baby jokes. However, in cases like this, the cruel humorist is encouraging us to direct our moral rancor not at the babies in the jokes, but at sentimental attitudes that usually accompany discourse about infants. It is that complacent sentimentality that the dark humorist thinks deserves a moral whack.

  Similarly, the recurring mentally-challenged “Gumby” characters in Monty Python’s Flying Circus (see, for example, “Gumby Crooner” in Episode 9, “The Ant: An Introduction”) seem to be basically an assault , by his own hand, on excessive sentimentality. It is not that Gumby deserves to be hit on the head with a brick, as he is; rather, the ethical energy underwriting the harsh laughter here is aimed at the sentimentalization of the mentally ill. The butt of the laughter lives off-screen, in a manner of speaking. It resides wherever pompous types congratulate themselves for caring for their “inferiors.”

  15 Corbyn Morris, An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Raillery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) (New York: Garland, 1970).

  16 S.H. Wood, Walpole and Early Eighteenth-Century England (London: Methuen, 1973), p. 61.

  17 Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 287.

  18 Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 97-98. I quote from propositions 4.461 and 4.4611.

  19 Rush Rhees, “Wittgenstein’s Builders,” in Discussions of Wittgenstein (New York: Schoken, 1970), p. 80.

  20 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Third Edition, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 43.

  21 Ludwig Wittgenstein. Remarks on Color (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), p. 58e, paragraph 317.

  22 I have in mind Hume’s Ideational Theory of Meaning. See, for instance, David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), Section II, pp. 20-22

  23 Ludwig Wittgenstein. On Certainty (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), p. 60e.

  24 This is not the only time the Pythons evoke this tradition; consider the more explicitly philosophical sketch in episode 27 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (“Whicker’s World”) in which Mrs. Premise and Mrs. Conclusion find themselves arguing about the meaning of Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Roads to Freedom’:MRS. PREMISE: . . . Well this is the whole crux of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Roads to Freedom.

  MRS. CONCLUSION: No, it bloody isn’t. The nub of that is, his characters stand for all of us in their desire to avoid action. Mind you, the man at the off-license says it’s an everyday story of French country folk.

  MRS. PREMISE: What does he know?

  MRS. CONCLUSION: Nothing.

  MRS. PREMISE: Sixty new pence for a bottle of Maltese Claret. Well I personally think Jean-Paul’s masterwork is an allegory of man’s search for sonally think Jean-Paul’s masterwork is an allegory of man’s search for commitment.

  MRS. CONCLUSION: No it isn’t.

  MRS. PREMISE: Yes it is.

  MRS. CONCLUSION: Isn’t.

  MRS. PREMISE: ’Tis.

  MRS. CONCLUSION: No it isn’t.

  MRS. PREMISE: All right. We can soon settle this. We’ll ask him.

  MRS. CONCLUSION: Do you know him?

  MRS. PREMISE: Yes, we met on holiday last year.

  25 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971).

  26 Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1971), pp. 47-66.

  27 I don’t want to single out Baptists for ridicule. Some of my best friends were once Baptists. And I have enough ridicule to spread among many deserving factions, each convinced that the others are bound for Hades. This special conviction is my cue that God wants me to make fun of them.

  28 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 181 (translation slightly modified).

  29 See Thomas J.J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966); Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).

  30 Graham Chapman, et al., Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Book) (New York: Methuen, 1980), pp. 23-24.

  31 Freud describes the problem in The Future of an Illusion (New York: Norton, 1927).

  32 Dr. Jacob Bronowski, author of The Ascent of Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), which is the text version of a TV series produced by the BBC. Bronowski, who “knows everything,” was a mathematician, statistician, poet, historian, teacher, inventor and a leader in the Scientific Humanism movement.

  33 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 182.

  34 Nietzsche associates Jesus himself with the psychological type of the divine idiot, and means it as praise for Jesus. See The Anti-Christ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), Section 29.

  35 See Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

  36 See Nietzsche, Ecce Homo and On the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 36-37, 40, 73f, and so on.

  37 He
nri Bergson, Laughter (New York: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 16-17. The ring of Gyges is a Greek legend (see Plato in The Republic, Book II) about a ring that turns the wearer invisible, bringing absolute power and some very naughty behavior.

  38 “Cyprian’s Supper,” is an anonymous parody from the fifth or sixth century in which many biblical characters, from Adam to St. Peter, take part in a great banquet and are satirized with brief, sharp verses.” See the Associated Press story in The Clarion Ledger (March 26th, 2005) and http://www.clarion-ledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050326/FEAT05/503260355/1023 .

  39 Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (New York: Warner, 1984), pp. 576-78.

  40 Even though Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life won the jury prize at Cannes. See The Life of Python, BBC/A&E, executive producers Elaine Shepherd and Amy Briamonte (2000).

  41 See Robert Hewison, Monty Python: The Case Against (New York: Grove Press, 1981). Shortly after the film was released, Cleese and Palin debated Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark on the BBC2 discussion program Friday Night, Saturday Morning.

  42 Blaise Pascal, Pensées (New York: Modern Library, 1941), Fragment 233.

  43 I would like to thank Tom Alexander and Aaron Fortune for their silly and unhelpful advice about this essay.

  44 Joseph Campbell, Transformations of Myth Through Time (New York: Perennial Library, 1990), p. 218.

  45 Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: First Anchor, 1991), p. 57.

  46 The notion of a “masculine ethics” is based on the “ethics of justice,” a concept developed in turn by Harvard psychologist, Lawrence Kohlberg.

  47 See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982).

  48 In Arthurian tradition, the Black Knight is the Thunder Knight, killed by Yvain in Chretien de Troyes’s account. See Campbell, Transformations of Myth Through Time, p. 237.

  49 Joseph Campbell, Transformations of Myth through Time, p. 239

  50 Joseph Campbell, Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York: Arkana, 1991).

  51 My thanks to George Reisch and Gary Hardcastle for their excellent editing efforts on this chapter and to William Irwin for inspiring philosophical discussions.

  52 Digha Nikaya, Potthapada Sutta in The Buddha’s Philosophy of Man: Early Indian Buddhist Dialogues, edited by Trevor Ling (Everyman’s Library, reissued 1993), p. 34.

  53 David Denby, New York Magazine (April 4th, 1983).

  54 Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).

  55 This phrase was appropriated by Superman in the 1950s.

  56 That is why work sucks, and always will.

  57 The appropriately concerned reader may rest assured that God is aware of the aforementioned unions.

  58 A wink or nod is sufficient acknowledgment.

  59 The Devil was known to sneak about the gaming tables jabbing naked buttocks with his pitchfork.

  60 Okay, so they’re still alive. Chances are they’re older than you are, so they’ll be dead when you get there. Happy now?

  61 Which, as you now know, is much better than it used to be.

  62 David Hume, Principal Writings on Religion: including Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion. Edited with an introduction by J.C.A. Gaskin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Having finished that, have a go at J.C.A. Gaskin, Hume’s Philosophy of Religion (London: Macmillan, 1978).

  63 Saint Anselm, “The Ontological Argument,” in John Perry and Michael Bratman, eds., Introduction to Philosophy, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 39-40.

  64 David Hume, “Of Miracles,” in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), pp. 72-90.

  65 Michel Foucault, The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, edited by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York: The New Press, 2003), p. 375.

  66 Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, edited by Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1994), p. 8.

  67 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 37.

  68 Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 93.

  69 Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 76.

  70 “Hermits,” Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 8, “Full Frontal Nudity.”

  71 Simon Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 129.

  72 Franz Kafka, “Couriers,” in R.C. Solomon, ed., Existentialism, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 171. Other great works of twentieth-century fiction and drama owe much to Kafka, such as the plays of Samuel Beckett (whose Waiting for Godot is subtitled a “tragicomedy”) or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

  73 Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis,” in The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken, 1971), p. 91.

  74 Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in Solomon, Existentialism, p. 197.

  75 John Cleese et al., Monty Python Speaks! (New York: Avon Books, 1999), p. 249.

  76 John Cleese et al., The Pythons: Autobiography by The Pythons (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2003), p. 306.

  77 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Daybreak,” in A Nietzsche Reader (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 87.

  78 Monty Python Speaks!, ibid., p. 247.

  79 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), Chapters 4-6.

  80 Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and The Flies (New York: Random House, 1975).

  81 The Gay Science (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), p. 344.

  82 The Will to Power (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 688.

  83 A nice discussion of the development of the show occurs in, G. Perry, Life of Python (London: Pavilion, 1983).

  84 Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972), pp. 229-243.

  85 Leon R. Kass, Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002), p. 65.

  86 Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” in Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon, eds., The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 4-5.

  87 I thank George Reisch for his excellent comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and Gary Hardcastle for risking accepting a chapter by an Englishman from Gerrards Cross.

  88 Philosophers discover nonsense periodically. David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) did so in the eighteenth century. No one has discussed nonsense philosophically with quite the verve of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), however, who devoted a whole chapter of his Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) to “insignificant speech.”

  89 Note the rhetoric of the upper-case letter in this. No one wants to study nothing; but Nothing, well, that is different. As regards Nothing, there turned out to be a great deal to say, none of it, as one might expect, understood to be nonsense by those who said it. For a whole lot of Nothing, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962).

  90 These are all, of course, moments in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. For the eel-filled hovercraft, see “The Hungarian Phrasebook Sketch,” Episode 25, “Spam.” Proceed to Episode 7, “You’re No Fun Anymore,” for the blancmanges, and then back to Episode 25 for Karl Marx in the sketch titled “Communist Quiz” (aka “World Forum”). Finally, for the fully grown Minister of Overseas Development see “Mrs. Niggerbaiter Explodes,” in Episode 28, “Mr. and Mrs. Brian Norris’ Ford Popular.”

  91 Intertextuality, when viewed as more than plagiarism, can effect a decisive transformation in an image of academic misconduct by which we are possessed, also. This fact has not, however, wholly appeased the editors.

  92 Carnap offers this diagnosi
s in his essay “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” in A.J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism (New York: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 60-81. I use “overcoming” and not “elimination” in the text since it is both a better translation of the original and more expressive of the Carnap’s intent. Some influences on Carnap in this matter are scouted by Gottfried Gabriel in his introduction to Steve Awodey and Carsten Klein, eds., Carnap Brought Home (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), pp. 3-23.

  93 One of the few great theorists of humor in the history of philosophy was Kant, who expressed clearly that telling stories in which things that happen to be physically impossible happen (a man’s hair turning white in one night) is simply boring, whereas telling stories in which wildly bizarre things happen (a man’s wig turning white overnight) is often funny. For Kant this was indicative of the need for engagement of the understanding in trying to learn something from the story, an engagement that is frustrated in a unique way in the joke. This is all in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).