Still The Very Model Of A Modern Monty Python
Monday, 30. January 2006, 18:16:59
For Christmas, someone gave me a Monty Python trivia calendar.
It's the sort of calendar that one tears a page from each day. If so inclined, one may make a little pile with the torn-off pages, as a sort of tangible demonstration of precisely how much of the year, and how much of one's life, one has uselessly frittered away thus far. One may even be inclined to reflect that a whole lifetime worth of calendar tear-offs probably wouldn't even fill a beer case, and thus be confronted with both the inevitability of one's death and the utterly trivial nature of one's life, on a universal scale, at the same time.1
That's probably not what the gift-giver had in mind when she selected the calendar, but I have special talents in this area. Mad skills, as it were. Which is all beside the point, actually, because it's Monty Python in general and not the Meaning Of Life in particular that I want to say something about today.
Many of the trivia questions on the calendar are ludicrously hard. They tend to be things like "What was Mousebender doing when he suddenly 'came over all peckish' and decided to visit the Cheese Shop?" "Mousebender" was a placeholder name used on the script for the "Cheese Shop" sketch. As far as I know, the name was never used for anything else, as wasn't even mentioned in the "Cheese Shop" sketch itself. Mousebender does indeed mention what he was up to before he visited the cheese shop, but it would be possible to watch the "Cheese Shop" sketch a hundred times without noticing what it is. Other questions are in a similar vein, asking about the titles of one-off sketch shows like "Nationwide," which were deliberately given generic news show names, or about the habits of characters that only made a single appearance.
On reflection, perhaps this shouldn't be too surprising. Most of the Monty Python canon - meaning the TV series - doesn't have recurring characters, or recurring features at all. One might argue that the sketches, largely based on setting up comfortable stereotypes and contexts and then immediately smashing them all to bits, are free of anything conventionally understood to constitute "characters" at all. This sort of thing doesn't lend itself too well to trivia questions, and the calendar plays out as something more like "The Monty Python Weird Moments Review." Which, as a fan of many years standing, is fine with me.
Which leads me to the other thing that struck me today. The humor still seems incredibly modern and fresh, despite being over 30 years old. When watching the TV episodes, it's impossible to miss the fact that the hairstyles, clothing styles, and even the graphic design behind the animated segments are all firmly rooted in the 1960s and 1970s. And it's the parts of the 60s and 70s that aren't hip in a retro sort of way - like the enormous collars, huge ties, odd in-betweeny hair lengths, etc - that one notices the most. It can be distracting. But on the printed page, the humor, while truncated down to only a glimmer of the full performance, is also somehow purified and laid bare.
Today's calendar question involves a number of sketches that were fake TV news or documentary programs, like "Whicker Island," which featured an island inhabited by former television interviewers, and "The World Around Us," which was about a growing subculture of people who secretly enjoyed dressing up as mice. These sketches, written 30 years ago, are effective parodies of the reality shows, talk shows, and media navel-gazing on TV today.
Maybe there's a simple reason for that. Maybe TV hasn't actually changed much in the last 30 years, despite the plummeting cost of video production and the proliferation of channels. If that's so, it's probably because the most important aspect - the audience's expectations - haven't changed much either.
Which could mean that Monty Python, deliberately or not, tapped in to something much closer to the core of the human psyche than one might at first suspect. Monty Python seems (to this American) to transcend the time, place, and culture that it's a part of. This sketch, for example, is a topsy-turvy version of a class conflict within one family. It uses a cultural context that I simply don't have any references for (Working-class Dad disapproves of his son's highfalutin' white-collar lifestyle? That just doesn't happen here!) but the upending of the stereotypes works, regardless. Americans who watch this sketch end up laughing without being able to explain why, precisely.
Maybe that's why, as a teenager in the 1980s, 15 years after the show's last season, I was one small part of the MTV generation, discovering Python all over again. Maybe that's why the DVD collections, the transcript books, and the trivia calendars continue to sell today. I for one will continue to be a fan as long as they still seem funny.
It looks like that could be a while.
NOTES
1. This experiment is best left to professional depressives, and should not be undertaken without expert supervision.2
2. Well, for Pete's sake, at least don't start with an empty beer case. You'll be wanting a beer or two before the experiment is over, I shouldn't wonder.
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