Over the weekend someone sent my the link to one of the funniest Monty Python sketches: The Philosphy World Cup. Anyone who hasn’t seen this hilarious sketch should certainly do so. Here’s the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vV3QGagck

This is one of my favourite Monty Python sketches, not least because, somewhat unusually for the Pythons, they come down on the right side, in the sense that the Greeks are victorious over the Germans! Of course, relegating St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas to the sidelines, quite literally, in their being linesmen, whereas Confucius presides as referee, is somewhat suspect (to say the least)!

Visitors to this site might also be interested to know that two of the funniest Monty Python sketches were stolen or borrowed from G.K. Chesterton. In Chesterton’s first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, one of the characters continues the conversation using a new langauge involving convoluted movements of the left leg, proceeding to do a silly walk around the room. In another of GKC’s novels, The Man Who was Thursday, one of the characters suggests speaking to another in a new language involving surreptitious movements of the fingers and toes, an idea that was used by the Pythons in the sketch in which famous works of literature, such as Wuthering Heights, are adapted into morse code and semaphor. I don’t know for certain that Monty Python stole or borrowed these ideas; it might be simply a case of great comic minds thinking alike. Nonetheless, the fact remains that Chesterton hatched these comic ideas half a century before Monty Python came up with its versions.

As for the legacy of Monty Python, the desire to shock conservative sensibilities was ultimately the death of its humour. The brilliance of the television series, and the hilarity of the Holy Grail, was marred by the flirting with blasphemy in The Life of Brian, several hilarious scenes notwithstanding, and was ruined in the juvenile smuttiness of The Meaning of Life, which, for the most part, was simply middle-aged men making adolescent jokes about sex and bodily functions. As such, it can be said that the Pythons flushed themselves down the toilet that they created for themselves.