Monty Python, Shakespeare and English Renaissance Drama by Darl Larsen

Author:Darl Larsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2014-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

It is the note of sadness found in this type of satire which is missing from Python’s work, unless it is a sadness effectively masked by a comic veneer. Monty Python certainly diminishes subjects, though, from the Inquisition to the English legal system and the crown; and from effeminate bobbies to stereotypically-affected gay judges. A group of antlered Masons hopping about on a busy street wearing their trousers about their ankles is ridiculous, to be sure, as is the image of a member of the government stripping down to his underwear and stripper tassels as he recites English monetarist policy. Authority figures are lampooned at every turn, including Python’s employers at the BBC, but so are commoners, all foreigners (but especially the French), and even the Pythons themselves. Their Englishness is both a high ground from which to lob comedic missiles, as well as the perfect target for their humor of self-deprecation. It is difficult to justify permanently affixing Monty Python with either appellation—Horatian or Juvenalian—since the loftiness and indignation of the Juvenalian is just the type of target Python often chooses. The reflexivity and self-deprecation found in Horace, along with the more “relaxed and informal” nature of the Horatian speaker might be more suitable. The Python attacks often seem scornful, but that supposed scorn is quickly deflated by a following segment, which is itself undercut by another segment, and so on. Elements of other forms, specifically the carnival and the grotesque, which will be discussed below, must also be considered. Abrams notes that “any narrative or other literary vehicle can be adapted to the purposes of indirect satire” (169). Indirect satire includes the Menippean tradition wherein—formal considerations aside—“both the heroic values associated with more elite forms of literature and of the hierarchical organization of both classical aesthetics and the social order that classical aesthetic categories mirror” are objects of ridicule (Blanchard 26–27). In short, Menippean satire as practiced by the Greek Cynic Menippas, the Roman Varro, and later Burton in Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) contained often excruciatingly long passages of

extended dialogues and debates … in which a group of immensely loquacious eccentrics, pedants, literary people, and representatives of various professions or philosophical points of view serve to make ludicrous the intellectual attitudes they typify by the arguments they urge in their support. (Abrams 169)

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