Culture Thursday: This explains *so* much about me

Posted by Liberal Librarian September 19, 2024

Culture Thursday: This explains so much about me

Look.

I didn't come out fully formed from the head of Zeus like some Washington Heights Athena. Oh no, my friends. It took a lot of experiences to turn me into the sarcastic, ebullient blog lord you see before you today.

I was always a precocious child. As my brothers were twelve and ten years older than me, I was exposed to many things that other kids my age were not. Not only did I watch I, Claudius when I was eight or nine, but I was reading Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars at ten or eleven. Yeah, I was that kid.

But nothing—nothing—had an early impact on my outlook on life and its idiocies as five Oxbridge comedians—and one weird American—who formed that Dadaist, surrealist collective known as Monty Python.

Over on CounterSocial yesterday, two users were discussing the latest Mossad attack on Hezbollah communications devices. One of them asked, "What will explode next?" I immediately replied, "Penguins", and posted this:

One of them remarked, "How did you have this ready to post??" I replied, "My mind is a matrix of Monty Python references." And it really is. The writing of Cleese, Chapman, Idle, Jones, and Palin is part of my cultural underpinning. I quite literally would not be the same person you know if I had never been introduced to Python. (Thanks, Tony!)

Now, I know the Python boys are not everyone's cup of tea. Again on CounterSocial there is a user who haughtily declared they weren't funny. (He turned out to be an antisemite and Jeremy Corbyn fanboy, so that tracked. Folks like that take themselves way too seriously.) But for me, it was formative. I have all the episodes on my media server, and now and again I will dive into a season and binge watch, laughing maniacally as if it were the first time I was watching them.

Sadly, Terry Jones and Graham Chapman are no longer with us. John Cleese and Terry Gilliam have gone weird. Sir Michael Palin has segued to a life as a professional travel presenter. Eric Idle, really, is the only one of the Pythons keeping the flame alive, as long as he has breath. But their work will live on, as little boys and girls are introduced to this strange collection of misfits, and something clicks and they carry on the torch of being very silly, very silly indeed.