Some of the funniest scenes ever filmed can be found in a movie that really isn’t fun. I mean Monty Python’s Life of Brian¸ the only Python film that makes me look at my watch. Perhaps exposure to the New Testament brings on preachiness. At any rate the boys had a big truth to announce, as opposed to a smaller truth they could explore. Announce their message they did, far too many times. Their whaling away at their chosen theme (“think for yourself”) recalls teetotalers who finally take a drink and find out why they shouldn’t. The gang wound up sloppy and dim, and cursed with a drunk’s misplaced stamina; hence the movie’s misfired climax, the long chase scene with the crowd.
Yet Brian’s actual ending is one of the group’s best musical numbers, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” Not only that, the movie’s start is the excellent “blessed are the cheesemakers” sketch, and scattered through the film can be found the scenes with the People’s Front of Judea and the ones with Pontius Pilate and his good friend, Biggus Dickus. The boys couldn’t help being talented, even when pursuing an ill-considered project in the desert. Since preachiness is such a hazard for Brian, I’ll note that the good sketches show Python’s normally deft way with various human truths and a semi-truth. “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” rests on the sense that relentless positivity depends on being an obnoxious thickhead (that’s the semi-truth). The cheesemakers sketch takes a medium-size but useful piece of wisdom, that historical events are remembered neatly but not experienced that way, and demonstrates it in a piercingly heightened form. The People’s Front of Judea takes a narrow and simple truth (a lot of people on the far left are quarrelsome blowhards) and works it up with a great deal of well observed detail. The Pilate scenes are based on the simplest and smallest truth of all: it’s very hard not to laugh when your moron boss has a speech defect.
People shouldn’t laugh at speech defects; I don’t say they should. They shouldn’t laugh at gayness, and it’s undeniable that Pilate’s a terrible swish. The analysis of trans issues presented by Reg, leader of the People’s Front of Judea, strikes me as shallow and way too hostile. But it’s all funny, and so are the blessed cheesemakers and the singing crucifixion. The rest of the movie shows the greatest truth of all: anyone can screw up.
Internet corner. Memes about Keith Richards inheriting the earth have been joined by memes about Keith and prehistory. The Keith jokes, when they started out, took as their premise that the old man really ought to be dead. Mick’s ancient too, but everyone knows about Mick’s health food and regular exercise. Keith wallows in bourbon and spent the prime of his life shooting heroin. If he hasn’t died by now, he must be unkillable—that was the idea. “We need to start worrying about what kind of world we are going to leave for Keith Richards,” read a popular meme. A museum joined in the fun. “It is said the only two things to survive a nuclear war would be cockroaches and Keith Richards,” remarked the Children’s Museum of West Hartford, Connecticut, when that playful institution gave Keith’s first name to a Madagascar hissing cockroach. Then the jokes entered a new stage. “Rare footage of Keith Richards’ first concert,” said a meme. The picture showed Fred Flintstone watching his TV set made of rock, and on the screen they had a photograph of Keith and his wrinkles playing guitar.
I point out the following only because no one else has seemed to notice. Now the idea isn’t that Keith will keep on living, it’s that he’s always been alive. From unkillable to immortal to eternal, the meme Keith keeps on progressing. Next he’ll be infinite and people will make Keith jokes about the spacetime continuum. Next, I’m afraid, he’ll die. Because, jokes aside, none of us is fooling anyone.