The post is a bit late arriving at Gather having come as usual from my UK site Boggart Blog where it was online on 4th Ocober to mark the 40th anniversay of the first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus going out on BBC TV.
The Logic Of Python
Friends, Gatherites, contrymen, I am here to praise Python not to mimic them. The humour that men writes lives on after them, so let it be with Python. Yes, forty years on from that first episode the popularity of Monthy Python lives on.Why is that I wonder?
Sorry, what?
I asked why Monty Python is still so poular?
I didn't expect The Spanish Inquisition
Enter the Cardinals: - No one expects The Spanish Inqisition. Our chief weapon is fear and surp... Our two chief weapons are fear, surprise and ruthl... I'll start again
Monty Python’s Flying Circus was surely the most culturally significant television programme ever. It took a style of humour based on a cult British radio show, The Goons, starring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and harry Seacome, and stretched, twisted and reshaped the surreal silliness to fit a new televisual medium. And it influenced a generation of British performers. Python instantly became part of popular culture.
No it didn't
Yes it did
No it didn't
How many times during my working life have I found myself while enduring a particularly dull management meeting thinking “I never wanted to be a management consultant, I wanted to be a lumberjack.”
How often as I delivered a particularly pointless PowerPoint presentation have I resisted the urge to adopt a silly voice and start talking about exploding squirrels.
Python was not so much a programme, more a way of life although that was actually the title of another 1960s sketch show. but you know what I mean.
Another sketch show? Who was in that?
It really doesn't matter.
We will decide if it matters, who was in it?
I can't remember
(Enter The CArdinals) Think you can fool us eh. Cardinal Fang, fetch the comfy chair.
-- Not..............the comfy chair (dramatic orchestral chords)
This is getting too silly, can we move on please?
For many years, working at a senior level in Information Systems, it seemed I was seldom involved in an informal conversation conversation with colleagues that was not punctuated with references to Python, The Goons, Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy and the songs of Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. It was a secret code that said, “look we know we have to pretend but no sane person can take this management bullshit seriously. There was an old joke in business that a Management Consultant is someone who asks for your watch and then tells you what time it is.
(What Time Is It Eccles - a lesson in telling someone the time from The Goons. This is radio comedy so be prepared to exercise your imagination)
Sometime after Pyython a strange thing happened. The younger generation of managers were taking the bullshit seriously. They actually though phrases like “business process re-engineering” and “skills delivery systems” meant something.
What my generation had in common with the Python team, The Goodies, writers like Tom Sharpe, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett was that thanks to our exposure to “The Renaissance Education” we understood that nothing should ever be taken seriously, the world is crazy and everything in it is in fact insane. Start taking things seriously and you will soon go mad.
The Goodies perform The Funky Gibbon
The kids coming out of the modern education system are indoctrinated with some strange ideas. To them pgrases like "business process re-engineering" or skills delivery system" made perfect sense. To tem a team building exercise is about group therapy sessions and playinf with childrens building bricks together rather than a prolonged booze up. Many of them actually believe we irrational, emotion driven creatures should live lives governed by logic and reason. They are convinced logic is infallible and machines will always be superior at thinking to us humans, just as soon that is, as us humans have actually managed to define what thinking is and programmed machines to do it for us. But as we are a long way from being able to define what thoughts actually are, let alone simulate the process in binary code, we just have to make do with the insanity of logic or the sheer imbecility of bureaucracy. jhave you noticed how few decisions are actually made by humans these days? We fill in a form, hand it to a beaureaucrat who applies a template and if the crosses show up in the right holes the form makes the decision.
People who entered career in computers, the industry of pure logic, in the 1960s and early 1970 were equipped to understand how illogical logic really is. Newcomers to the profession in later years were conditioned to think the insanity of logic was all perfectly rational.
This perhaps explains why Python has remained so popular, it’s humour is logical in a completely illogical way.
Exactly like life really.
RELATED POSTS:
Growing Up With Monty Python
The Stupidity Of Crowds We are repeatedly told of "the wisdom of crowds" these days but not so long ago the conventional wisdom was, "don't follow the crowd, think for yourself.
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Comments: 36
Umm...perhaps going a bit too far, that. :)
But, being a huge fan myself, I cannot imagine a world without Python. And please take heart, Ian. Our generation is passing it onto our children. My 10-yr-old niece can perform verbatim many of the skits (with correct inflections, although her British accent is rather lacking) from the show both on her own and with her mom. I believe there will be a revival coming soon where the younger generations will be exposed to the wit and wisdom of Python and carry the torch into the future for us.
My favourite (not made up by me was that vital piece of telecomms testing equipment the Peripheral And Processor Electronic Reactive Communications Line Interface Proble or Paper Clip. It worked too, straighten your paper clip and bend it into a U shape. Insert it into a DTE interface pin 2 & 3 and check that input data echoed back. Now that is advanced technilogy.
I used to think it was an IT thing, but I believe acronyms are taking over the world at this point. Shows just how lazy we really are when we can't even get up the energy to call something what it really is instead of reducing it to a few letters. :)
"Monty Python’s Flying Circus was surely the most culturally significant television programme ever. "
Umm...perhaps going a bit too far, that. :)
In the sketch about the organised crime chiefs The Piranha Bros, you may remember, while the violent Piranha Brither Dinsdale who in his paranoid delusions was stalked by a giant hedgehog named Spiny Norman, would nail people's heads to tables, his more feared brother Duggie used sarcasm, invective, irony, hyperbole, litotes and satire to terrorize his victims.
I was just taking my cue from Duggie and using a bit of hyperbole to soften up my readers.
One I did that ran for a week before people spotted it was GENERALISED Information Transfer And Logging System. Not a true acronym but amusing.
:)
This would ave been quite OK in the privacy of his own home (he lived alone natch) but in the office.....?
(for the uninitiated Bert Weedon who still lives, was a guitarist and worked with many top Britush artists. He is best remembered for his guitar tutor book Bert Weedon's Play In A Day. The first lesson taught three simple chords so people could accompany themselves singing Banks Of The Ohio or something simple like that. The book became commonly know as Bert Weedon's Play With Yourself In a Day.
"We are normal and we dig Bert Weedon."
Notmal? What the hell does that mean. Bloody physiotherapists, they yank my left arm and the right one which has always been OK goes out of control.
My mother got me started on Monty Python. She'd heard them on the radio. Yup, sound tracks from the TV show.
In about 1970 I got my wife a Steiff hedgehog. She loved it and named it Norman. When we saw the Piranha Bros sketch a few years later we couldn't believe it when Spiny Norman came up. Our Norman is about 4 inches long though and is, sad to say, mobility challenged. He lives in a curio cabinet with his friend Mort, a Steiff boar.
I have an OTR cd of Goon Show mp3s. They're great. A lot of them have the amazing jazz harmonica player Max Geldray too.
One of The Goons, Spike Milligan, was an excellent jazz trumpeter. As well as Max Geldray, (excellent, as you say) musical breaks were also provided by the Ray Ellington Quartet who were part of a Trad jazz revival in the UK during the 1950s. That led to the interest in the R & B of Muddy Waters, Lightning Hopkins, BB King and many others that in turn inspired The beatles, Rolling Stones etc.
One of the few cable options that would tempt me to re invest in a TV and cable would be if I could get BBC America without the other crap stations that the local cable companies obligate you to buy!
Bit I think you can get old BBC programmes vias broadband now. I'll get back to you on that.
Monty Python reached the US and my peer group about the time we discovered getting high. It was the only time we turned on PBS, other than to watch Rumpole.
I loved Terry Gilliam's artwork from the first moment.
I still don't know what someone means when s/he says, "I don't 'get' British humor."
We have one person in our department who is Python impaired and he wanted to use his youth as an excuse, but he is the same age as one of my kids and she is well-versed so we just think he's stinky.
But instead of writing a 2000 word critique of comedy, Ill just back you up. Your colleague is skinky - and very possibly a closet nerd.
Which British comedies are considered mainstream? "Are You Being Served?" is still shown daily in this city. It's like the sitcom that will not die. Never has any show lasted so long on three scripts and one joke.
"Coupling" was like "Friends" except the people actually got laid. That could be why I can watch it but will always hate "Friends."
"My Family" is a hoot, but the American version failed miserably, as did an American version of "Coupling."
I'm not sure I've been exposed to much mainstream. BBC America gave us "Peep Show," "Green Wing," "Black Books," "Little Britain," and "Spaced" on Fridays nights, then pulled them all and gave us Monty Python reruns. Damn! Then we got "That Mitchell and Webb Look" and one summer they snuck in "Velvet Soup" which we totally loved because of the freaky clown sketch.
But they just haven't delivered us the comedies as much as the dramas, the scifi, Gordon Ramsey, and Top Gear. And the reality shows never seem to stop - the nasty ladies who go to messy homes, the nasty lady that wants to look at poo, and I am guessing every house in England has been visited by Carol Smiley and repainted and every attic raided by Jonty for antiques.
If you liked Velvet Soup you will love The League Of Gentlemen which is a dark, surreal sitcom / sketch show hybrid with characters consisting of grotesques and weirdos. You have to wait until series two until the most memorable character appears when Papa Lazarou's Pandemonium Carnival comes to town. But series one has plenty of good stuff including Edward and Tubbs who keep a Local Shop For Local People and refuse to serve anyone who isn't local and hillary Briss the butcher whose best selling line is "the special stuff" and who has a very nice deal going with the local undertaker.
Next to this Mrs Slocombe's Pussy is poor, tame stuff and Smiley Smiley Carol Smiley is like an attack of piles.
Lay off Republicans :-) my cybersweetie is a Republican (though she was no fan of Bush) and she loves all this comedy. We once spent an hour on a transatlantic phone line reciting Little Britain sketches. I keep telling her she was born on the wrong continent.
We have Gillian but I watched her once and thought she was just awful. Maybe we've been given that gift so we can understand the reference when Graham Norton cracks a joke about her. Graham is popular here and we've just gotten Jonathan Ross and I'm enjoying his style. The night he had Rufus Wainwright as a guest had me on the edge of my chair waiting to see if he could say the man's name.
I will leave the Republicans alone when they stop hating on those of us who want progress and equality. Until then, I will point and laugh at them because they don't understand Stephen Colbert is making fun of him and is not doing a comedy show for them. (A university study proved it. Republicans tend to be satirically impaired.)
I went off Democrats though after one of the biggest Obama fans at this site went apeshit because I was doing Sara Palin jokes (pretending I had her confused with Michael Palin) "You should be writing what an evil person she is", I was told.
Why? She's never done me any harm. So really that puts some Democrats in the same category as those Republicans who think Colbert is a news documentary. The friend that I mentioned sent me a Colbeert DVD a couple of Christmases ago.
Jonathan Ross BTW is know as "Wossy, here" but I think we are so used to him now nobody thought twice about his pronunciation of Wufus Wainwight.