Monty Python would’ve destroyed the woke brigade
On Sunday evening, John Cleese performed a stand-up routine in front of a necessarily sparse audience at London’s Cadogan Hall, and a larger number tuning in online. The Telegraph’s critic, Dominic Cavendish, was unyielding in his criticism, stating that it was like a lecture, “humourless and earnest”, with Cleese sermonising on the state of the world like a weary headmaster.
This is a sad postscript for one of the greatest comedians of the past 50 years. He has consistently decried the current climate of obsessive offence-taking (not least when Fawlty Towers episode “The Germans” was briefly erased from the UKTV website) and warned that comedians must not adhere to the humourlessness of the baying mob. His routine could have brilliantly reflected on that. After all, along with the other members of the Python team, Cleese had been skewering cancel culture before it officially happened.
The Pythons forged their humour in the late Sixties and early Seventies, at a time when British society was becoming particularly susceptible to a sort of groupthink. It is thus no surprise that their comedy feels particularly relevant now.
The funny thing is that most people don’t look beyond the surreal when assessing the Pythons. It is true that you can simply embrace the madness of something as anarchic as the “fish-slapping dance” or the “Proust in 15 seconds” competition, but people tend to overlook the fact that they had a far more serious agenda. They were smartly lampooning a time when bureaucracy in Britain was crushing individuality of thought (sound familiar?).
This was a time when the trade unions ruled: an “everybody out” mentality enslaved the nation’s workers, and daring to cross the line in an industrial strike could result in being blacklisted by fellow workers.
The genius of Python was that they realised that much of the madness of those difficult decades was bound up in words and that they exploited the gibberish often spoken in a way that felt Kafkaesque.
Take the Spam sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1970, in which Eric Idle and Graham Chapman (in drag, naturally) sit down to eat at a greasy spoon café, only to discover that there is very little on the menu other than that much-loathed tinned meat product that got us through the war. Terry Jones, playing one of his many screech-voiced harridans, reeled off the “choices” in an increasingly aggressive manner.
“Egg, bacon and Spam. Egg, bacon, sausage and Spam. Spam, bacon, sausage and Spam. Spam, egg, Spam, Spam, bacon and Spam. Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, baked beans, Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam.”
Then the other patrons of the café, for some reason a group of Vikings, start chanting “Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam”, before descending into a sort of Norse folk song.
Here, Idle and Chapman are the ordinary individuals who find themselves marooned and unable to communicate, essentially excluded (and driven mad) by everyone else around them.
Perhaps the Pythons’ comic brilliance reached its apex in the 1979 film Life of Brian. Of course, this is now best remembered for controversy over its supposed blasphemy, as well as the jaunty closing musical number (Always Look on the Bright Side of Life).
But actually, it was doing something incredibly important. This is a film about the madness of crowds. Brian (Chapman), accidentally hailed as the Messiah, urges the mob around him to think for themselves, but all they can do is parrot his words back at him. Thoughts are forged with a demented logic, as illustrated in a scene in which Stan (Idle) wants to have a baby but is told quite reasonably by Reg (Cleese) that he can’t. “What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he can’t have babies?” Michael Palin’s Francis says that it is “symbolic of our struggle against oppression”. Reg soberly remarks that it is a symbol of his struggle against reality.
This is clearly the sort of comedy that Britain is crying out for in 2020. It’s clever and, for all its zaniness, it’s subtle. There are some comedians who have put their head above the parapet and tackled the pervading mood of cancellation. Geoff Northcott, Dominic Frisby and, most famously, Ricky Gervais have spoken about the medieval madness that now reigns supreme, but they feel like lone voices. It should be noted that Uk-based Russian comedian Konstantin Kisin often pricks the pomposity of po-faced groupthinkers. Perhaps it takes the sober eye of an outsider (and an outsider with first-hand experience of an oppressive regime at that) to so smartly analyse the insanity.
Certainly, Gervais is too big to be brought down by the woke brigade, but the others wouldn’t appear on any approved list of comedians. The BBC are part of the problem, as their heavily promoted Mash Report shows. There is an air of unctuousness to its right-on comedy that sometimes feels as Orwellian as the mindset the Pythons were parodying many decades ago. The Corporation must realise that something like The Mash Report doesn’t represent the views of all and that, as our national broadcaster, they must challenge the current lunatic mood of constant sanctimonious judgment.
If today’s comedians need any pointers about how to be funny they should look no further than a sketch on the pathology of extremism from Cleese, to be found on Youtube under the title John Cleese vs Extremism. Written more than 30 years ago, it is one of the most perspicacious things I’ve ever seen.
In it, Cleese explains that the great attraction of extremism is that it gives you enemies, and thus an outlet for bilious hatred for those with “a lot of anger and resentment” in them anyway. Both the hard-left and the hard-right offer plenty of options: authorised enemies of the Left include the police, the City, judges, public schools, fox hunters “and, of course, moderates”; authorised enemies of the Right include vocal minority groups, unions, welfare spongers, peaceniks, the BBC “and, of course, moderates”. Focus on any of these and “you can strut around abusing people… and still think of yourself as a champion of the truth, a fighter for the greater good, and not the rather sad paranoid schizoid that you really are”.
Come back John Cleese. Just remember to be funny next time.
The Python team had been skewering cancel culture before it officially happened