Coincidentally read a comment yesterday on the lines of "strange women lying in ponds distributing swords does seem like a decent basis for a system of government at this point".
I mean, if I went around sayin' I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!
--
The text doesn't do the scene justice. Michael Palin is a national treasure!
mdp2021 13 hours ago [-]
> Michael Palin is a national treasure
...But for his postman. (Possibly obscure reference from Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive. Pluri-national, international treasures.)
mdp2021 11 hours ago [-]
(...I tired to find the clip and post the transcript, but it is unavailable. It was along the lines of Michael's postman having been interviewed in 2007, complaining that Palin received too many letters. Mark Watson must have replied that "It was sad, since Michael Palin speaks with high regard about his postman"... And so on.)
Funny coincidence, I believe a few hours earlier I read a comment from Dang who called some complaints a "Help, help, I'm being repressed".
Gives you a proportion of the extent...
dang 3 hours ago [-]
I have to force myself not to use that line. It's too sarcastic for a good mod comment, but it's also so perfect, it pains me to edit it out. So other few words fit! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lStcwT_RGrQ#t=50).
6stringmerc 1 hours ago [-]
It’s a hard business, being a shrubber, that we must all acknowledge.
omega3 32 minutes ago [-]
Is there anything even remotely comparable in quality to Monty Python right now?
gbuk2013 13 hours ago [-]
And there was much rejoicing! :)
6stringmerc 1 hours ago [-]
Those poor minstrels.
sema4hacker 2 hours ago [-]
It forever burned Castle Anthrax into my memory.
BLKNSLVR 17 hours ago [-]
Should be required watching for entry to adulthood.
bambax 11 hours ago [-]
I first saw it in school, at 15 (a looong time ago). Could not believe my eyes. Could not believe one was allowed to even do that. The incredible freedom of it all, starting with the title sequence, and the incredible irreverence, crazyness.
I think it's fair to say it changed me as a person. I never took anything too seriously after that.
john_the_writer 13 hours ago [-]
My 15year old can quote it. Their teacher said something the other day, and she replied from the movie. They both laughed, but the rest of the class (apparently) all looked confused. I was very proud.
Same thing happened with a FleetwoodMac song. Different teacher.
readthenotes1 6 hours ago [-]
One company I worked for, we used to joke that we should get rid of all the software questions and ask what the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is.
nickpeterson 3 hours ago [-]
That would be a terrible interview question, because it doesn’t clarify whether you mean an African or European swallow.
ycombinatrix 30 minutes ago [-]
That's part of the appeal, the candidate needs to answer with a range or ask a clarifying question that uno reverses the interview
spc476 2 hours ago [-]
But then the interviewer will be launched into the Pit of Eternal Peril.
block_dagger 17 hours ago [-]
It's not dead yet.
dvh 15 hours ago [-]
Can someone decipher what one of the prophets was talking about, the "thing with attachment", it always struck me as a perfect portrayal of a prophet that somehow seen future, but because himself being from a distant past cannot really comprehend or explain it.
rightbyte 14 hours ago [-]
Wasn't that in Life of Brian?
nkrisc 14 hours ago [-]
It was.
Oarch 12 hours ago [-]
With the raffia-work base
dvh 11 hours ago [-]
Well what is it?
sorokod 14 hours ago [-]
I thought that was more in the spirit of "Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things"
ggm 15 hours ago [-]
I enjoy python stuff but not all of it aged well. A lot of older comedy aged better. Jacques Tati films for example. Or Chaplin.
They could be bizarrely homophobic and also celebrate gay culture in the same show. They were often very misogynist.
I still laugh at it. I still watch it. But the adulation faded.
No Australian enjoys their take on Australian wine. It's wincingly unpleasant. Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and Clive James fed cultural stereotypes which died out when earl's court became too expensive for Australian backpackers. The abos armpit thing comes back to me far too often from naive British friends who would never use the N word, or make jokes about Irish being stupid. They don't know what they're saying.
Eric Idle complained he had to do Spamelot to get some retirement income. George Harrison made bank on the films.
The situationist surreal stuff, Terry Gilliams pasteup animation, very good. Dressing up as ladies.. tiresome.
There's a line from pythons dressing up as working class women to little Britain making fun of incontinent old women.
jeroenhd 12 hours ago [-]
Monty Python was hardly the only show that featured men dressed as women. Drag has actually been part of British entertainment for a long time. And, honestly, I don't really see the big deal, as long as it's not done with a hateful agenda.
Little Britain's poor taste jokes would've happened regardless of Python, because of its centuries long history of crossdressing.
Many of their takes also involved kicking back against society. Put a man in a woman's position and suddenly the things women endured daily become absurd. Have a man make a crass suggestion towards another man like an asshole would to a woman, and suddenly it becomes absurd and weird. In isolation those events could be considered homophobic, but between an animated politician eating the queen and a farmer explaining that his sheep are flying into trees to nest, I don't think such pessimism is warranted.
My take watching Python is that the actors very much knew that misogyny and homophobia are stupid as a concept. They didn't shy away from portraying society as it was (and unfortunately, still is), but they weren't necessarily trying to take anyone down.
The fact many Python sketches are offensive these days says more about how society has aged than Python, in my opinion. When Python has a man in a dress, it's just a silly character, but when in modern media it has become necessary for such things to be a statement for (or, even worse, against) basic human rights.
I think the strength and weakness in Python is that they'd make fun of anything and anyone. That include sensitive topics that haven't changed as much as they should have in the last century.
Angostura 13 hours ago [-]
“Dressing up as ladies” was just a massive part of British comedy that went back to music hall. See also Les Dawson, Dick Emery etc etc.
ChrisMarshallNY 56 minutes ago [-]
My understanding, is that it went back to Shakespeare. In Ye Olde Days, women weren't allowed to act. Men dressed in drag to play the parts of women, and used those shrill voices.
As it was, I think Connie Booth was the only proper lady that showed up in Python stuff.
dazzawazza 13 hours ago [-]
Everything is of it's time. They pushed the barriers back in their time so that we could enjoy a better world now. They never claimed to be omniscient and that is to all our benefits.
Casual racism has and always will be there. No point in worrying about it.
mdp2021 13 hours ago [-]
> Casual racism
Intentional joking, with the understanding that it should be taken as a joke. Often about the reaction of the triggerable. "Dear BBC..."
wiredfool 60 minutes ago [-]
I really don’t think that the blackface in the Philosophers sketch is about the reaction of the triggerable.
mdp2021 35 minutes ago [-]
Remind us of the clip. The Bruces? The football? Where did you see it?
rightbyte 14 hours ago [-]
I think the cosplay was quite challanging at the time? Like, there was very little kicking downwards. Little Britain lacks taste in comparison.
ggm 14 hours ago [-]
Yes it was hugely transgressive. As was the nudity. John Cleese presenting the fake 6 o clock news wearing nothing but a bow tie, Gilliam playing the piano starkers.
I'd say there was a bit of kicking down. The gumbies and the three Yorkshireman a bit (that predates python, they brought it in with them, they'd written for something like "that was the week that was") mainly they kicked middle class values.
nonrandomstring 12 hours ago [-]
True, but do you (HN readers) look on transgression only with
nostalgia? What would be usefully transgressive today? Much subversive
humour is Socratic in just asking (pointing out) hard questions.
In that vein, TBH I find it hard to square a post celebrating famous
British humour on a site where any humour, whether good or in poor
taste, is mercilessly punished by downvoting and faux outrage. I'm not
calling hypocrisy, just pointing to an odd juxtaposition of values.
Do y'all delight in things the Python team said precicely because you
wouldn't tolerate it or have the personal sense of security to say it
today?
Joeboy 12 hours ago [-]
As per other comments, women being played by men was and is a venerable tradition in British comedy and not actually very transgressive at all. It feels more "transgressive" now than it did then, I think because we imported US culture war stuff in the last decade or so.
I don't think HN actually hates humour, it just has a relatively high bar. Some of my most upvoted comments have been jokes. But I like to think they were reasonably good ones.
Regarding the Pythons and transgression, I think for me it's probably a case by case thing. There's obviously "good" transgression and "bad" transgression, but I suppose you have to have some support for the willingness to transgress, if you want positive social change to be a possibility.
Regarding specific things the Pythons said, the most actually transgressive-at-the-time thing I can think of is probably Graham Chapman's overt homosexuality and support for gay rights, which was no small thing in 1970s Britain.
Edit: Or you could make a case for it being the "blasphemous" Life of Brian, although I don't think the public outrage about that was really in step with mainstream opinion.
Edit2: I'm wondering whether Some Like it Hot, Milton Berle etc were considered transgressive in the US? Were these things not actually quite mainstream in the 20th century, even in the US?
nonrandomstring 5 hours ago [-]
That's insightful though I wasn't pitching that so much as humour
being just part of life and removing/excluding it distorts
discourse. I've heard many fascinating accounts of how sensitivity to
humour indicates the "health" of a society, and when it vanishes that
is prelude to conflict, even war.
Yes, I think us Brits defused many of our internal tensions as a
mult-cultural AND classist society in the 70s and 80s with the
transition from vaudeville racism to new-wave "alternative comedy".
It didn't change the status-quo but it did move the dial toward more
progressive ideas.
I do think HN is an odd place in it's intolerance of humour, and I
don't see that "high bar" because TBH it's the lowborw geeky
"knob-gags" that make the grade here in my observation. I think it's
actually the old struggle of poets and philosophers (see Republic 2,
3, 5 [0]) is at play. HN adapts to filtering what it can't process.
It's a bit like that AI brain in Blake's Seven that Villa causes to
explode by feeding it riddles. I'm noticing even this "meta" talk
about humour is being downvoted (and I hope those doing so are getting
a good ironic laugh from that) :)
> I do think HN is an odd place in it's intolerance of humour
I've always seen this as a counterculture to Reddit, not as intolerance of humour.
nonrandomstring 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not familiar with Reddit, but assume it descended into total
clownery. Hence the rules "don't comment that this place is starting
to get like Reddit" I guess.
CoastalCoder 10 hours ago [-]
> any humour, whether good or in poor taste, is mercilessly punished by downvoting and faux outrage.
I've made my share of (attempted) humourous posts on HN.
The main pushback I've gotten has been from people who want to keep the conversations focused on "serious" discussion.
bambax 11 hours ago [-]
> A lot of older comedy aged better. Jacques Tati films for example. Or Chaplin.
As a Frenchman I should be defending Tati but by God I have never found him funny. Poetic, maybe (maybe!) but funny?? Not in the least IMHO. One can guess what he means, immediately, there is no subtext. "Modernity is dehumanizing." Yeah, well, it probably is, but we all know that now, don't we? (Same thing with Chaplin BTW.)
Monty Python is incredibly funny, and still is, because it's often absurd, and absurd stays absurd forever.
nkrisc 13 hours ago [-]
> Dressing up as ladies.. tiresome.
I’ve heard that before and I don’t get it. They were just playing characters like any other they played, but some were women so they wore woman’s clothing.
stavros 12 hours ago [-]
I'm not English so I get it, it's not that they dressed up as women specifically, it's that they did it constantly. After the Nth time it got a bit old. I know that men dressing up as women was a UK comedy staple at the time, but it always looked a bit too trite to me (even when I was a teenager).
It has nothing to do with feminism (for me, at least), it's just that I didn't find it funny.
nkrisc 11 hours ago [-]
But the joke wasn't that they were men dressed as women. Typically they played it completely straight. The joke was the character they were portraying, a type of character that was often a man or a woman.
When femininity was an important part of the sketch, they often had Carol Cleveland or other women play the role.
If you don't find it funny that's fine.
mdp2021 11 hours ago [-]
> it's that they did it constantly
That amounts to objecting to representing females. Rule was: "female unless awkward → one of the pythons; when awkward → Carol Cleveland".
The point was that the writers would also be the performers.
card_zero 11 hours ago [-]
The Kids in the Hall did it too, extensively, in the 90s.
crtasm 8 hours ago [-]
and again in 2022
shreyshnaccount 15 hours ago [-]
while it hasn't aged the best, it is quiet entertaining
ghaff 15 hours ago [-]
I never totally connected with Holy Grail though I liked/like it a lot. I probably to put Life of Brian at the top of the heap although it’s probably somewhat less known.
nosianu 13 hours ago [-]
No no, The Meaning of Life is the best one, how can there be any doubt of that!
apologies, I am talking about the Flying Circus, not Holy Grail, which I should have clarified on my original comment. obviously the group has done some groundbreaking work and I do love that, but sensibilities have definitely changed since then. I don't hold that against them, but it can be jarring to see
mdp2021 3 hours ago [-]
Are you sure that being sensitive in those terms would be a good idea, and not instead be giving value to lower reactions?
You should judge a fair assessment of reality, not a self-fed "sensation".
shreyshnaccount 11 hours ago [-]
don't really understand the down votes, but I am very open to hearing why it seems to be a controversial statement. the show has some bigoted scenes and I am not defending that, obviously. I am simply talking about how I like the creative premises of the absurdist comedy
bambax 11 hours ago [-]
The downvotes are probably because there's no justification. If you want to say that some masterpiece from the past "hasn't aged well", you need to back that opinion with some arguments or facts.
Also the typo ("quiet" instead of "quite") and the absence of capitals at the beginning of sentences, or points at the end, give out a general impression of carelessness.
mdp2021 11 hours ago [-]
> the show has some bigoted scenes
Such as.
shreyshnaccount 4 hours ago [-]
oh I see, I am talking about The Flying Circus, not the movie. The casual use of slurs is jarring to me personally
mdp2021 3 hours ago [-]
Still cannot remember of any bigoted use of slurs in Monty Python's work.
riffruff24 14 hours ago [-]
yes it has
Joeboy 14 hours ago [-]
This isn't an argument, it's just contradiction.
lancefisher 13 hours ago [-]
No it isn’t.
bambax 11 hours ago [-]
Yes it is.
metalman 12 hours ago [-]
Cleese on a talk show with Taylor Swift is evidence of how efortless it is for him to totaly
take over a situation, poke horrible fun at someone, without giving cause for offence, charm the hell out of woman 25% his age ,while talking about his own wife and her cat
he's old now, but still formitable
buddy got to work with him
jspash 13 hours ago [-]
Just curious. How does the leading word "How" get missed off from the headline to the submission headline? Its a totally different sentence now. Is there a word limit to HN headlines?
mdp2021 13 hours ago [-]
There is a pattern recognition and transformation mechanism in place that rearranges bad title forms, such as "12 ways to serve Spam".
ginko 11 hours ago [-]
I loathe this automatic editing of titles on HN. "How X became Y" and "X became Y" has a completely different meaning.
If there's submissions with stupid titles like "12 ways to serve Spam" then these should just be flagged by the users.
dang 3 hours ago [-]
Anything is loathsome when you only count the cases it gets wrong!
Absolute masterpiece.
"Now we see the violence inherent in the system..." :-)
https://www.reddit.com/r/AccidentalRenaissance/s/foguWdeDMY
--
The text doesn't do the scene justice. Michael Palin is a national treasure!
...But for his postman. (Possibly obscure reference from Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive. Pluri-national, international treasures.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhaBIU9TcJ0
Gives you a proportion of the extent...
I think it's fair to say it changed me as a person. I never took anything too seriously after that.
Same thing happened with a FleetwoodMac song. Different teacher.
They could be bizarrely homophobic and also celebrate gay culture in the same show. They were often very misogynist.
I still laugh at it. I still watch it. But the adulation faded.
No Australian enjoys their take on Australian wine. It's wincingly unpleasant. Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and Clive James fed cultural stereotypes which died out when earl's court became too expensive for Australian backpackers. The abos armpit thing comes back to me far too often from naive British friends who would never use the N word, or make jokes about Irish being stupid. They don't know what they're saying.
Eric Idle complained he had to do Spamelot to get some retirement income. George Harrison made bank on the films.
The situationist surreal stuff, Terry Gilliams pasteup animation, very good. Dressing up as ladies.. tiresome.
There's a line from pythons dressing up as working class women to little Britain making fun of incontinent old women.
Little Britain's poor taste jokes would've happened regardless of Python, because of its centuries long history of crossdressing.
Many of their takes also involved kicking back against society. Put a man in a woman's position and suddenly the things women endured daily become absurd. Have a man make a crass suggestion towards another man like an asshole would to a woman, and suddenly it becomes absurd and weird. In isolation those events could be considered homophobic, but between an animated politician eating the queen and a farmer explaining that his sheep are flying into trees to nest, I don't think such pessimism is warranted.
My take watching Python is that the actors very much knew that misogyny and homophobia are stupid as a concept. They didn't shy away from portraying society as it was (and unfortunately, still is), but they weren't necessarily trying to take anyone down.
The fact many Python sketches are offensive these days says more about how society has aged than Python, in my opinion. When Python has a man in a dress, it's just a silly character, but when in modern media it has become necessary for such things to be a statement for (or, even worse, against) basic human rights.
I think the strength and weakness in Python is that they'd make fun of anything and anyone. That include sensitive topics that haven't changed as much as they should have in the last century.
As it was, I think Connie Booth was the only proper lady that showed up in Python stuff.
Casual racism has and always will be there. No point in worrying about it.
Intentional joking, with the understanding that it should be taken as a joke. Often about the reaction of the triggerable. "Dear BBC..."
I'd say there was a bit of kicking down. The gumbies and the three Yorkshireman a bit (that predates python, they brought it in with them, they'd written for something like "that was the week that was") mainly they kicked middle class values.
In that vein, TBH I find it hard to square a post celebrating famous British humour on a site where any humour, whether good or in poor taste, is mercilessly punished by downvoting and faux outrage. I'm not calling hypocrisy, just pointing to an odd juxtaposition of values.
Do y'all delight in things the Python team said precicely because you wouldn't tolerate it or have the personal sense of security to say it today?
I don't think HN actually hates humour, it just has a relatively high bar. Some of my most upvoted comments have been jokes. But I like to think they were reasonably good ones.
Regarding the Pythons and transgression, I think for me it's probably a case by case thing. There's obviously "good" transgression and "bad" transgression, but I suppose you have to have some support for the willingness to transgress, if you want positive social change to be a possibility.
Regarding specific things the Pythons said, the most actually transgressive-at-the-time thing I can think of is probably Graham Chapman's overt homosexuality and support for gay rights, which was no small thing in 1970s Britain.
Edit: Or you could make a case for it being the "blasphemous" Life of Brian, although I don't think the public outrage about that was really in step with mainstream opinion.
Edit2: I'm wondering whether Some Like it Hot, Milton Berle etc were considered transgressive in the US? Were these things not actually quite mainstream in the 20th century, even in the US?
Yes, I think us Brits defused many of our internal tensions as a mult-cultural AND classist society in the 70s and 80s with the transition from vaudeville racism to new-wave "alternative comedy". It didn't change the status-quo but it did move the dial toward more progressive ideas.
I do think HN is an odd place in it's intolerance of humour, and I don't see that "high bar" because TBH it's the lowborw geeky "knob-gags" that make the grade here in my observation. I think it's actually the old struggle of poets and philosophers (see Republic 2, 3, 5 [0]) is at play. HN adapts to filtering what it can't process. It's a bit like that AI brain in Blake's Seven that Villa causes to explode by feeding it riddles. I'm noticing even this "meta" talk about humour is being downvoted (and I hope those doing so are getting a good ironic laugh from that) :)
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/
I've always seen this as a counterculture to Reddit, not as intolerance of humour.
I've made my share of (attempted) humourous posts on HN.
The main pushback I've gotten has been from people who want to keep the conversations focused on "serious" discussion.
As a Frenchman I should be defending Tati but by God I have never found him funny. Poetic, maybe (maybe!) but funny?? Not in the least IMHO. One can guess what he means, immediately, there is no subtext. "Modernity is dehumanizing." Yeah, well, it probably is, but we all know that now, don't we? (Same thing with Chaplin BTW.)
Monty Python is incredibly funny, and still is, because it's often absurd, and absurd stays absurd forever.
I’ve heard that before and I don’t get it. They were just playing characters like any other they played, but some were women so they wore woman’s clothing.
It has nothing to do with feminism (for me, at least), it's just that I didn't find it funny.
When femininity was an important part of the sketch, they often had Carol Cleveland or other women play the role.
If you don't find it funny that's fine.
That amounts to objecting to representing females. Rule was: "female unless awkward → one of the pythons; when awkward → Carol Cleveland".
The point was that the writers would also be the performers.
"Every sperm is sacred..." (https://youtu.be/fUspLVStPbk)
or
"Can we have your liver?" (https://youtu.be/Sp-pU8TFsg0)
:)
You should judge a fair assessment of reality, not a self-fed "sensation".
Also the typo ("quiet" instead of "quite") and the absence of capitals at the beginning of sentences, or points at the end, give out a general impression of carelessness.
Such as.
If there's submissions with stupid titles like "12 ways to serve Spam" then these should just be flagged by the users.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
You can modify them again if the automated result is unsatisfactory.
> these should just be flagged
No, we submit articles, not titles. (Which in journalism are often not even the product of the same author.)
The original submitter can for a limited time. Often they don't, leading to butchered titles like this one.