[ExI] life of brian, was RE: riots again

[spike]

>. On Behalf Of John Clark
Subject: Re: [ExI] riots again

 

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012  Charlie Stross <charlie.stross at gmail.com> wrote:

 

 > >note that Monty Python's "Life of Brian" was: * Banned by 39 local
councils in the UK [... shunned...picketed... bad reviews...]


>.Banning a movie is bad; having a movie, which you probably haven't even
seen, drive you into such a idiotic homicidal rage that you even start to
murder people who had nothing to do with the movie is worse. .John K Clark

 

 

I recall in the states, LoB created the Pastor's Dilemma.  They could
expound at length on how this scandalous movie should be banned for all its
blammisphy, but in order to know if it is blammisphy, or even expound on its
contents, the people would need to actually see the movie, which would
defeat the purpose of speaking out against it.  The other option is to say
nothing, which may be considered tacitly condoning it.

My own take on it is that Life of Brian isn't *exactly* a comedy.  It has
the Monte Python team doing their usual brilliant and hilarious cutups, so
good that we hear them quoted regularly to this day especially by the
computer science crowd, one of the very few comedies which has quotes that
made it into the cultural lexicon.  

But Life of Brian is a comedy with a point.  In this, the writers follow
that other British feller from a long time ago, what's the name,
Shakespeare.  His comedies had an underlying theme, or a shape to them.
There were jokes within jokes, comedy with depth.  In the case of LoB, there
was overlying comedy with a non-comedy depth: an alternate explanation for
how Christianity was started.  In that case, it was actually a very good
alternate theory: a man was essentially drafted, against his will, to be the
messiah for a lost horde in desperate need of a messiah.  I saw it as an
excellent story, wrapped up in those funny accents and the delightfully dark
and peculiar British sense of humor.

spike

  

 

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