Monty Python and Philosophy (11 page)

All one needs is a literal-minded group who neither believes nor disbelieves, asking obvious questions. Religious sincerity crumbles.
The same could be done to any preacher in his pulpit anywhere, but none will do it. Yet when fire-and-brimstone evangelists ply their trade on college campuses, sometimes this scene is replayed. More often the listeners are beset with the countervailing pathos, opposing the pathos of the evangelist. Throughout
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
,
detachment
from pathos pushes the plot and generates the humor. The story depends not upon mocking God, Jesus, or even Brian, but upon holding oneself at a distance, not allowing the countervailing pathos of opposition to take hold—Nietzsche called this countervailing pathos
ressentiment
.
³⁶
And how is the latter pathos avoided? One can rise above it, as would an
Übermensch
, but that isn’t funny; or one can idiotically fall below this dialectic, a sort of divine
Untermensch
. Brian doesn’t claim to know anything. He would be glad to, but he doesn’t. He is a well-meaning moral idiot, just like nearly everyone else. When questioned, he shifts ground and finally gives up, like anyone with common sense.

Thus, the death of God is not
simply
the end of a certain concept of God, nor of the power of that concept to fill us with fear. The death of God is the onset of a detachment from the entire question of God, and common sense telling us that
no one
actually has the answers to questions like “is there a God?” Those who possess such detachment by native temperament find Pythonic religious humor pleasing, while those who do not find it troubling, offensive, or even blasphemous. Common-sense detachment from impossible questions leads us to tend our
mortal
souls, leaving the immortal soul, if there is one, to its own fortunes.

Today we need not be as upset about all this as Nietzsche. He thought that killing off this old God means humans would have to bear God’s burden—and would be unequal to the task. But I think we are probably up to the chore, which is part of the revelation I received when I asked Brian into my heart. Yet there really is a “moment of decision” Brian puts to his hearers: “shall I
shun this, be offended by this, condemn this?” If the still small voice in the back of your brain says, as mine did: “no,
if
there is a God, He’s surely enjoying this too, and if not, bugger Him,” then you are open to salvation of the sort Brian brings. Of course, this is salvation
from
the pathos of religious authorities who would ruin your cheer with their dreary pronouncements of Hellfire, with a thinly veiled confidence in the absolute truth of their own convictions (concealing an utterly unconscious fear that they may be wrong). Their confidence is difficult to distinguish from mere pride, but it is best not to judge, since, as Brian taught, you might get judged yourself if you do it. Better to laugh. They can’t do much about that—at least, not any more.

According to Henri Bergson, “the Comic” just is anything overly stiff that holds itself opposed to the flow of experience, and when its rigid bearing is noted by others, laughter results. The person who is “comic” has at least two very important characteristics. First is this mechanical inelasticity, this rigidity amid what should be a flowing present. Second, a “comic” person is invisible to himself
as
comic, does not realize he is being rigid. As Bergson says, “the comic person is unconscious. As though wearing the ring of Gyges with reverse effect, he becomes invisible to himself while remaining visible to all the world.”
³⁷
Hence, the art of the straight man affects sincerity, rigidity, unself-conscious pathos—and the Pythons, especially Chapman and Cleese, are among the best straight men comedy has ever produced. But for the pathetic follower of the dead God, comic rigidity is no affectation, it is a mode of existence. So the issue is not
whether
religious fundamentalists are utterly comic, the crux of the matter is whether anyone will point it out so that we can all laugh. But your soul is still in jeopardy, so don’t laugh yet.

We have more to say of rigidity and the comic, but please grant that it is far more difficult to be funny about things that are already funny, like the Pythons, because funny stuff isn’t rigid and comic. In such situations one needs recourse to the lower types of humor: puns, off-color jokes, ethnic slurs, or, at the very bottom rung, politics. We are not scrupulous people. Let’s do politics.

It is hard to be the only remaining super-power. One’s empire is always getting a bad rap. But there is no pleasing some people, as both Jesus and Brian taught. Bring people the aquaduct, sanitation, roads, medicine, education, order, peace, and even the public baths and good wine, and what do you get? Just complaints about little foibles that come along with it—a taste for ocelot spleens and jaguar’s earlobes, or blood pudding and Branston Pickle. British humor has a connection to Roman stoicism, for the humor works in inverse proportion to the degree in which the humorists’ culture is repressed: the more repressed the conquerors, the greater the comic possibilities, which is one reason why British humor seems almost surreal to the American ear (one can hardly be more repressed than the British). But get one thing straight: It’s
their
empire, not ours, even when we have temporary administrative responsibility.

On a recent trip to Britain I discovered to my (very American) dismay that the British are unimpressed with American wine. I was poking around in a good wine store in Oxford and finding little or nothing American to drink. I affected my best British accent (the secret is to speak without moving the upper lip, the rest takes care of itself, with some practice), and inquired after some wine from California. The clerk (pronounced “clark”) lilted back: “’aven’t got any; tried it once, can’t sell the stuff.” He had spam, though. I had thought they made some pretty good wine in California, and here it isn’t even taken seriously. And if you pour what the Brits know about wine-making into a thimble, it wouldn’t even be half empty. No matter. Obviously I am a colonist. Having worn out the bit about “taxation without representation,” I’m looking now for the headquarters of the American People’s Front. What have the lousy British ever done for us?

And here’s the lesson of empire. Empire takes mettle. It isn’t for nancies or pleasure-loving creatures of comfort like Australians and the Americans. Empire requires one weapon: organizational genius. And of course, an unfailing sense of what is and is not important. So the
two
weapons of empire are organizational genius and an unfailing sense of what is and is not important.
And
perfect confidence in one’s own superiority. So, the
three
weapons of empire are: organizational genius, an unfailing sense of what is and is not important, and a perfect confidence
in one’s own superiority. I mean,
nobody
expects a perfect confidence in one’s own superiority. “Great race, the Romans,” says Michael Palin, hanging from the ceiling in chains the Romans granted him the privilege of wearing. But the same might be said of the British. It takes an astonishingly blithe attitude toward suffering (your own
and
other people’s) to keep hopping in your boats and invading every place you can even land, not to mention constantly having to spank (for their
own
good) the troublesome Dutch and French and Spanish who are without even the decency to bring British civilization to other lands. No, the Aussies and Yanks don’t have that in them.

To illustrate, it is far, far more important that Brian be made to conjugate his Latin correctly than that he be silenced from saying “Romans Go Home.” The true threat to empire is people who refuse to learn the
lingua franca
correctly. Was I not, after all, asking after American wine in the Queen’s own English? When in Rome. . . . History is a stubborn and harsh teacher. Right up to my own middle school years we were still learning, at the tip of a blade, to conjugate Latin. The language had been dead for five centuries. Now
that’s
an impressive cultural imperialism. People will be learning the Queen’s English everywhere for another two millennia, minimum. Some things come and go, some come and stay. Latin and English are of the latter sort. The Romans and the Britons, kindred spirits and stoically convinced of the unlimited power of self-mastery, are confident that when they have imparted their cultural forms to lesser people, that’s all that can be done for our betterment.

Having borne the superior man’s burden, a Roman or a Briton may freely stare in incomprehension at the ridiculous behavior of his empire’s foreign subjects. Yes, the foreigners have silly beliefs and customs; it hardly matters. But let them misuse the mother tongue and, well, they’re in for a good thrashing. It is little known that the actual cause of the American Revolution was an intense desire on the part of the British to teach table manners to the colonists. Not the Battle of Yorktown but our utter incompetence at eating peas off the convex curve of a fork led the British to give up on civilizing us. We would have to improve ourselves after 1783.

But our superior masters, Roman or British, ask no more of us than they ask of themselves—not one of the Queen’s native subjects
can possibly fail to see his own Latin teacher in Cleese’s centurion, nor fail to see himself in Brian’s own cowering submission to correction. Romanes eunt domus? I think not. A hundred times on the blackboard and no blood pudding. And of course, if Americans had anything like the British confidence of civilized superiority, they wouldn’t make such a fuss about being the greatest nation since 1066. Americans go on so much about it just because they
know
it isn’t true. Don’t be misled by a few simplified spellings, you self-appointed purveyors of American superiority. You know you love the Queen. You
know
you do. Praise Brian for the self-loathing Canadians. With them around at least Americans can feel superior to one other passel of British subjects. Now have some back bacon and return to your seat.

But there is more to it. One thing that is utterly lost on American audiences is how the Pythons use British class-consciousness as a continual source of contextual humor. Apart from the social situations themselves, the class consciousness is mainly conveyed by the various accents adopted by the Python characters, all the way from Terry Jones’s shrillest cockney up to John Cleese’s Oxbridge titter. It is no accident that the individual Pythons tend to occupy roles that cast them within the same class range of British society (with
some
small social mobility). But a lot of their posture towards all things British has to do with the re-enactment of their
own
class forms, made comic. It is the very rigidity of British class consciousness that creates the comic context.

And here we draw closer to the true secret that was revealed to me by God. The British understand the Romans so well because they built an empire to rival Rome’s own—not only by organizational genius, or an unfailing sense of what is and is not important, or by a perfect confidence in their own superiority, but also by sheer self-mastery and utter repression of all emotional weaknesses. So, four weapons. Five is right out. And the unexpected gift that accompanies these repressions is, surprisingly, an ability on the part of Romans and Britains to laugh at
themselves
. Americans simply don’t possess this capacity, at least not
qua
American. The British, like the Romans, are fascinated with how well they can mock themselves. Americans, lacking the needed detachment, become unconscious of their own pathos. The Americans may laugh
at
the British, but not at themselves, and which is the greater virtue? This is why Americans could never
have built the empire they now enjoy at the beneficent
noblesse oblige
of their British cousins (shame that the French got that phrase when the British own the virtue). Americans do not
want
to suffer for the sake of imparting higher culture to a barbaric world. They want to make money and B movies and live in Florida. Only their own comfort, security and wealth moves them in any serious way. Yes, yes, democracy, freedom, things of that nature, but it’s not like we will hop in our boats and go off to create it (not really). The British and the Romans willingly ordered their societies in ways as repressive to themselves as to those they conquered for the
sake
of civilizing the world, and without a moment’s doubt that they were the ones to do it. But of course, this is funny, is it not, or more precisely, “comic”?

Are they able to laugh at themselves
because
their sense of superiority is so little threatened by seeing how comical it is? Or are they actually superior
because
they have always been able to laugh at themselves? This is too great a question. Neither God nor Brian has revealed this bit to me.

You may doubt that anyone, even a writer with a special revelation, could now tie together all this business about God being dead and the comic and politics and empire, but you underestimate the power of Brianic salvation. Your lack of faith is appalling. I should give you all a good spanking. Like an alien craft catching my fall from the tower of my own babbling, comes the saving stroke of an Italian pen.

The idea of laughter as blasphemy is nicely joined to its class context near the end of Umberto Eco’s
The Name of the Rose
, a historical novel set in 1327. An old Spanish monk named Jorge, the librarian of a remote abbey, booby-traps the very last copy of Aristotle’s (now) lost treatise on comedy. Jorge is unable to bring himself to destroy the blasphemous book (he is a librarian after all), or allow anyone to
read
it (I always suspect librarians of secretly not trusting me with their books, and really wanting them all for themselves). Thus, he poisons the pages so that anyone will die from the sin of reading it. William of Baskerville, Eco’s protagonist, a sort of medieval Sherlock Holmes (and proper
Englishman), asks the old librarian in the climactic scene: “What frightened you in this discussion of laughter? You cannot eliminate laughter by eliminating the book.” The old monk answers, in a speech that would make even John Calvin proud: