Quite frankly I’m against people who give vent to their loquacity by extraneous bombastic circumlocution.
—Eric Idle in “Restaurant Abuse”
I would say that this makes more sense in the context of the sketch, but the scene makes no sense at all… and that’s high praise. This sketch in particular (and Monty Python in general) is aware of itself as humor. Pythonesque humor is hard to “get” nowadays because the world has lost its ability to remember that the world is terribly funny. Instead, social media has given us an “all angry, all the time” mindset.
The world is an absurd place and Monty Python was a cocoon of self-consistent, even more intense absurdity within it. If you go into this sketch not trying to make it make sense, not trying to find something to cancel, not desperately searching for something to be angry or snarky about, you might find that it’s one of their funniest ones:
Incidentally, since This Beautiful Sentence highlights things I’ve come across from my own reading, I saw this quotation in Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned from Monty Python by Brian Cogan and Jeff Massey.
Last week: M. Scott Peck on education as a process of bringing forth.
Next week: Uesugi Kenshin gets nostalgic.
See the index for what’s been posted and what’s to come.
I'd love to hear from you!