We watched Monty Python's The Meaning of Life last night. The film alternately sits atop my list of Monty Python's best work, trading spots with The Life of Brian and The Holy Grail depending on my mood. Yesterday it was The Meaning of Life, which I last watched seven or eight years ago.
The film is a chaotic assault on the senses. It is crude while managing somehow not to be impolite. It is what Monty Python's actors are still beloved for more than fifty years after their debut: cheerfully acerbic in their mockery of everyone and everything. Their comedy is on par with the best lines Lewis Carroll sprinkled through Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. Smart, dry, absurd, true, and ridiculous all at once.
I'd forgotten that The Meaning of Life was released in 1983. The arbitrary significance of a fortieth anniversary added poignance to the shock of rewatching this film for the first time since society turned upside down.
If life imitates art, Western society is a joint project of Monty Python and Mel Brooks, the American equivalent of Python's astute and buoyant wit.
“Now, sex,” says the teacher, played by John Cleese, to an all-male class that squirms with discomfort as he discusses foreplay. “Name two ways of getting the vaginal juices flowing," he asks.
"Rubbing the clitoris,” Eric Idle offers.
“What's wrong with a kiss, boy?” Cleese replies, "Why not start out with a nice kiss? You don't have to go leaping straight for the clitoris!”
Cleese lowers a wall bed and his wife arrives. The two of them banter about household affairs as they undress and get on the bed. “The penis is now, as you will observe, more or less fully erect,” Cleese explains to the class.
"A tiger, in Africa?”
It's the first Zulu war and a couple of officers emerge from their tent with glasses of whiskey, to investigate the mysterious overnight disappearance of an officer's leg.
“Bitten, sir," Eric Idle says blithely, glancing up from a book, "during the night." A party assembles to search for the tiger they believe responsible for biting off Idle's leg. They step over dozens of injured and dying soldiers on the ground outside the officers’ quarters, and proceed to a jungle where John Cleese spies a gigantic tiger through the trees. The party opens fire, and two men in tiger suits—Michael Palin and Idle again—step forward with their hands in the air, "Don't shoot, don't shoot, we're not a tiger, uh, we were just, um…”
“Find the fish."
A country manor house. Terry Jones in a tuxedo with absurdly long arms. "I wonder where that fish has gone,” he croons, standing on a chair. The camera turns to Graham Chapman in drag; a leather corset and black stockings, red boots and gloves. A dreamlike sequence follows, with an elephant butler and voices off camera.
"The machine that goes PING!”
A woman in labor is wheeled into an operating room. Two doctors, played by Graham Chapman and John Cleese, are suited up by nurses.
“It's a bit barren isn't it," Chapman observes, glancing around the room, "More apparatus please nurse! The EEG, the BP monitor, and the AVV."
“And get the machine that goes PING,” Cleese says.
“And get the most expensive machine in case the administrator comes!" Chapman says.
Hospital equipment soon surrounds an empty bed, until they remember the patient who was left against a wall. The expectant father is kicked out of the room in favor of tourists with cameras. The administrator arrives and they quickly turn on every piece of equipment.
"I see you have the machine that goes PING,” the administrator says approvingly, "This is my favorite. You see we lease this back from the company we sold it to and that way it comes out of the monthly current budget and not the capital account!”
The baby is born, the umbilical cord cut with a meat cleaver.
“Show it to the mother,” Chapman says. Cleese waves the baby in front of her. “That's enough,” Chapman barks. The baby is put in a cart and the medical staff begin to leave the room.
The mother calls out, “Is it a boy or a girl?”
“I think it's a little early to start imposing roles on it, don't you,” Chapman replies, "Now a word of advice. You may find you suffer for some time a totally irrational feeling of depression. PMD as we doctors call it. So it's lots of happy pills for you and you can find out all about the birth when you get home. It's available on Betamax, VHS, and Super 8."
“Isn't it awfully nice to have a penis?”
Eric Idle as lounge singer at the piano in an upscale restaurant, singing about penises.
“Oh shit, it's Mr. Creosote!” the fish in the tank cry and swim away nervously.
“Ah good afternoon sir, and how are we today,” John Cleese greets Mr. Creosote, played by Terry Jones in the biggest fat suit I have ever seen.
“Better,” Jones gargles back.
“Better?”
“Better get a bucket, I'm going to throw up.”
What follows is five minutes of Mr. Creosote projectile vomiting, eating enough food for twenty people, being enticed to eat a 'wafer-thin mint' and exploding, causing the other diners to vomit at their tables.
There is so much to this film, it's nearly impossible to summarize. The Very Big Corporation of America. Every sperm is sacred. The crime of first degree making of gratuitous sexist jokes. A rugby match that unfairly pits students against teachers twice their size.
We laughed until our faces hurt, but the film made me sad this time around. So much that was ludicrous and deserving of mockery has become reality. A warped reality defended by the humorless and the weak, the shrill and the waspish. Roald Dahl's books are being changed for 'sensitive audiences'. The words he wrote erased and replaced. When will we ruin the great comedies? After the world loses Mel Brooks, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin, and Eric Idle—will their work stand or will our version of the Cultural Revolution destroy it?