It's Monty Python's 40th anniversary and IFC is running a documentary on them, Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer's Cut) starting Sunday and running through Friday (that's Oct 18-23).
Jeremy Clarkson wrote in the (London) TImes, Cleverness is no more. This is a dumb Britain about his love of Monty Python and lament of Britain's increasing stupidity.
"[Monty Python's skit] Novel Writing is at the very heart of what makes Monty Python so brilliant. The notion of Thomas Hardy writing his books, in front of a good-natured bank holiday crowd in Dorset, while cricket-style commentators and pundits assess every word he commits to paper is a juxtaposition you don’t find in comedy very much any more. To get the point you need to know that while Hardy may be seen as a literary colossus, there’s no escaping the fact his novels are dirge. We see these attacks on intellectualism throughout Python. To understand the joke, you need to know that René Descartes did not say, I ‘drink’ therefore I am. You need to know that if you cure a man of leprosy, you are taking away his trade. And that really Archimedes did not invent football."
"Nowadays people wear their stupidity like a badge of honour. Knowing how to play chess will get your head kicked off. Reading a book with no pictures in it will cause there to be no friend requests on your Facebook page. Little Britain is funny because people vomit a lot. Monty Python is not because they delight in all manifestations of the terpsichorean muse."
At least it's not just the US.
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