comedy / england

i was standing in line somewhere recently, talking with a mainman, when i made an awesomely generalized, untrue, offhand, remark.
somehow i said, with confidence, "Monty Python invented comedy."
the comment was borne from fervor, and i expected to be ignored or then scoffed at when i realized there were a few people closer than i thought.
i was quickly surprised when a girl next to me said, "that's right." we smiled and nodded to each other, i muttered a few things to dampen my overarching statement, something like, "yeah, British people are so funny," and we went our separate ways.

there was no contest to my statement. this girl and i bathed with our 20th century brand of comedy knowing that it was not the first soap ever made, but feeling that, before it, there had been no better soap, and since it's coming, most soaps had been derivative of our little Monty Python. we saw it when we were young, maybe our dad's showed us. we were wonover by it's sillyness, and, as we grew older, it's cleverness. and at that moment, we were both ready to say, "yes, monty python INVENTED comedy."

as far as i can tell, comedy must be one of the oldest and most universal things in this world. if invented at all, it was by God himself.
laughing, at it's most basic, can be an involuntary reaction to being tickled / and at it's most complex, can be caused by an occurrence (whether staged or real), and last for minutes, hours, days, or years with no physical prodding necessary.

so while comedy did not begin in October of 1969, one could argue that a very new era of comedy did begin. these actors had all been in comedy productions before working together as a the collective Monty Python, but as a unit, they became the most outrageous, audacious, groundbreaking, comedic group of men available in their time. a time which, i believe, was extended by Terry Gilliam's work, until the late 80's.

but here is the idea.
Monty Python were able to reach such a large audience by tapping into a flowing current of excellent comedy that seems to lie in the very soil of England. whether knowingly or unknowingly, the group exists as an extension of what men like Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Hogarth had begun in the centuries before them.

i do not state this lightly.
and i will not become bogged down in the authorship debates surrounding Shakespeare, the misascription of works to Chaucer, or even, the obvious parodying of Old Masters by Hogarth.
The produce of these men remains piled all over the world, and certainly all over England. Even if the poet's work was whittled down to a few honest pages, the body of material we would then call "the work formerly assigned to Shakespeare" would not lose any of the influence it had enacted on minds over those many years. and the material could still be studied, recited, and acted out for it's unshakable merit. If Hogarth's work was somehow suddenly cut out of academic curriculum for his blatant gibes at Religion and also Old Master's like Da Vinci, and Durer, his artistic lineage that fathered the comic strip would not simply dissapear.
The common thread for all these figures, and their work, is Popularity
they may have not even been the most talented or original men in their time. they, most likely, were not. yet they became very, very popular. and this is where we must meet them, as icons.
not to worship, but to study.



The Python men were exceedingly original; merely skimming over the surface of past work as they barreled down a massive wave of hilarity, abstraction, and poignancy.