Monty Python and Philosophy (41 page)

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

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

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.

Nietzsche,
The Gay Science
, p. 182.

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.

See
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
.

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

Henri 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.

“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
.

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

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).

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
.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

This phrase was appropriated by Superman in the 1950s.

That is why work sucks, and always will.

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

A wink or nod is sufficient acknowledgment.

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

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?

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

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).

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.”

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).

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.”

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.

Carnap offers this diagnosis 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.

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).

At this point the reader might wish to meditate on the fact that many consider W.V. Quine the greatest analytic philosopher. Moreover, as one of the editors pointed out, when Lenny Bruce started to get serious, he ceased being recognizably a comedian and became a philosopher. I count these as major confirmations of my account.

Peter Heath takes up this very example in a genuinely funny essay on ‘Nothing’ in the
Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(New York: Macmillan, 1967).

William James,
Pragmatism
(New York: Meridian Books, 1943), p. 163.

James’s sense of humor was observed by Gilbert Ryle, who noted that James “restored to philosophy, what had been missing since Hume, that sense of the ridiculous, which saves one from taking seriously everything that is said solemnly,” in A.J. Ayer et al.,
The Revolution in Philosophy
(London: MacMillan, 1963), p. 9.

Bertrand Russell,
Our Knowledge of the External World
(Chicago: Open Court, 1929), p. 42.

Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
(New York: Random House, 1966), p. 137. Nietzsche continues the thought by saying that philosophers are the “bad conscience of their time.” If we remember that the main and the best political critiques are offered by comedians, we have another startling confirmation of our account.

Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 47 (§111).