Monty Pythons Flying Circus

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Monty Pythons Flying Circus
This lecture about a landmark in the history of
television contains such diverse subjects as the
function of humour, comedy genres, Python as a
forerunner of postmodernism, post-Python.
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The Dead Parrot Sketch

• It's not pining, it's passed on. This parrot
  is no more. It's ceased to be. It's expired. It's
  gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot.
  It's a stiff. Bereft of life it rests in peace.
  It would be pushing up the daisies if you hadn't
  nailed it to the perch. It's rung down the
  curtain and joined the choir invisible. It's an
  ex-parrot.
• BBC TV comedy series, programme of 14 Dec.
  1969

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Python forerunners

• The Goon Show

The Goon Show ran on BBC Radio from 1951 to 1960.
It starred Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, Spike
Milligan.
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The Goon Show

• SERIES 4
• 2 10/9/53 THE MAN WHO TRIED TO DESTROY LONDON'S
  MONUMENTS
• 3 10/16/53 THE GHASTLY EXPERIMENTS OF HANS
  EIDELBURGER
• 13 12/26/53 THE GIANT BOMBARDON
• 15 1/8/54 THE MISSING PRIME MINISTER
• 18 1/29/54 THE HISTORY OF COMMUNICATION
• 23 3/1/54 THE GREATEST MOUNTAIN IN THE WORLD
• 24 3/8/54 THE COLLAPSE OF THE BRITISH RAILWAY
  SANDWICH SYSTEM
• 25 3/15/54 THE SILENT BUGLAR
• 29 4/12/54 THE BANK OF ENGLAND ROBBERY

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Python forerunners
At Last the 1948 Show, 1967
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Monty Python

• The Piranha Brothers from Face the Press,
  Second Series 15 9- 1970.

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Monty Python

• The Kray Twins
• On Tuesday October 24th 1933, at 8 a.m., Violet
  Kray gave birth to twins -- boys who would be
  christened Ronnie and Reggie. Reggie came into
  the world first -- ten minutes ahead of Ronnie.
  They would grow up to become, arguably, Britain's
  most famous and infamous gangsters. Their rise to
  prominence was inextricably linked to their
  birthplace and its legends and folklore.

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Kray Twins

• Their career was marked by the sheer
  improbability of their success and the ease with
  which they achieved it. Old style cockney
  villains, they came close to building a criminal
  empire, with an effortlessness that illustrated
  just how out of touch the forces of law and order
  were in this period, and how little the British
  establishment comprehended the true meaning of
  organized crime.

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The Kray Twins

• They were only ever convicted of two murders
  (one each) and both of their victims were
  miserable, low-life street thugs, with little to
  redeem them and as about as sympathetic a duo as
  Goebbles and Himmler. They were never charged or
  convicted of drug dealing, union manipulation and
  corruption or terrorism of the order demonstrated
  by their Italian or American counterparts. And
  yet, when finally cornered, tried and convicted,
  they received the heaviest prison sentence ever
  handed down by a British court of law. Reggie
  still languishes in prison, thirty-one years
  after being sentenced. Ronnie died there, of a
  heart attack. Many people believe that the real
  victim in the case of Regina v Kray was the law
  itself.
• From THE KRAY TWINS BROTHERS IN ARMS by Thomas
  L. Jones.

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TV Comedy Genres

• Situation comedies
• Stand-up comedy
• Sketch comedy

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TV Comedy Genres

• Situation comedies
• Comedy dramas
• Comedy of manners
• Charactets in funny situations
• Highly structured
• The Lucy Show

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TV Comedy Genres

• Stand-up comedy
• A solo comic
• Style of delivery
• From mid1980s political, material on sexuality
• Ben Elton, Frank Skinner

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TV Comedy Genres

• Sketch comedy
• A series of separate
• itemns
• No real linking theme
• Topicality
• Ongoing human foibles
• Monty Pythons Flying Circus

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Features of comedy

• Stereotypes
• Startling event or announcement
• Snowballing action
• Incongruity
• Exaggeration
• Animation
• Surprise
• Malapropism
• Puns
• Double entendres

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Post-Python the films

• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
• Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979)
• Monty Python's the Meaning of Life (1983)

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Post-Python the other series

• Ripping Yarns (1977-1979)
• Fawlty Towers (1975-1979)

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Proto-postmodernism

• Metafiction as comedy
• Parody as genre parody intertextuality
• Genre hybridity and fragmentation of narrative
• Satire attack on established values
• The institution of television revealed

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Proto-postmodernism

• Metafiction as comedy
• A combination of discourses.
• The author persona's discourse is the text
  itself, e.g.
• its production
• its mimesis
• research
• selection
• approach
• rhetorics
• thematics
• reception
• Interpretation

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Proto-postmodernism

• Metafiction as comedy
• Metafiction internalises three aspects
• The relationship between author and reader
• The relationship between fiction and criticism
• The relationship between art and reality
• A borderline discourse that takes the field
  between several discourses as its subject.

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Proto-postmodernism

• Satire attack on established values
• Jean-François Lyotard Death of the grand
  narratives
• La Condition postmoderne rapport sur le savoir,
  1979
• Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, 1982

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Literature

• Mark Currie, ed., Metafiction, Longman, London
  1995
• Wenche Ommundsen, Metafictions?, Melbourne
  University Press, 1993
• Stuart Sim, ed., The Icon Critical Dictionary of
  Postmodern Thought, Icon Books, Cambridge 1998
• Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon, ed., A
  Postmodern Reader, State University of New York
  Press, Albany, 1993
• Anthony Davis, Laughtermakers The Story of TV
  Comedy, Boxtree, London 1989
• Robert Hewison, Monty Python The Case Against,
  Eyre Methuen, London1981
• Gary Hardcastle, Monty Python and Philosophy,
  Open Court Publishing Co, 2006)
• Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the
  Unconscious, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1976 (1905)
• Jørgen Riber Christensen, Psycho - Analysis and
  Texts, Gyldendal, Kbh. 1987