Nothing -
NOTHING is above humor, and the more seriously we take things the more we should be willing to laugh at them.
Humor is a way of approaching serious or even painful subjects, things we might not be able to examine as objectively with a serious approach. In this way for example Eastern Europeans developed a great and huge collection of political jokes throughout the Soviet occupation years and repression, all of which are poking fun at some terrible things going on in their lives but this was the only way they could acknowledge the pain and confront it.
Example:
A (Polish, 1970s) man comes home to find his wife in bed with a neighbor, having wild sex. "You [expletive][expletive][expletive]!", he calls her. "What are doing wasting time here doing this when you're supposed to be standing in line for our weekly bread ration!"
What a way to face the reality that Poland (and maybe Romania) were the only European states after WW II to come seriously close to famine-like conditions.
I love the Monty Python films,
and I think
The Life of Brian says some very intelligent things about how people are so willing to be led by any fanatic or screwball claiming to have absolute truth. The film was sued by the British government in the 1970s under old blasphemy laws but the Pythons won out because they correctly pointed out the film doesn't make fun of Jesus or Christianity; the only time Christ shows up in the film at all is the first scene when he's giving the Temple on the Mount speech - and they poke fun not at him but at the fact that some people then - and today for that matter - just don't understand what he was saying ("Did he say, "Blessed are the cheese-makers?"), though they may claim to be practicing Christians. I just showed that film to a friend's teenage son, and he was taken aback by the scene where Brian accidentally disturbs the mountain monk (Terry Jones naked! Blech!) and at one stage the monk dismissively declares he doesn't believe Brian is the Messiah, at which point John Cleese's maniacal character ("You're the real Messiah, my lord, and I should know - I've followed quite a few of them!") shouts "Infidel! Kill him!".... My friend's son had recently heard some fundamentalist friends talking about infidels and this spooked him a bit. Good - good comedy
should shake you up and make you think, even if you ultimately reject it. Anything that makes you think can't be a bad thing.
The
Life of Brianb was merely trying to get people to examine their own religious beliefs, to get them to really justify to themselves whatever they claim to believe in. Most people around the world believe in their religion and its mythology simply because that's the culture they were born into, and they never question it. There's nothing wrong with holding religious beliefs, even strongly - it's just that far too many people hold such beliefs uncritically and without examination, and are even willing to kill others in the name of their own beliefs. (Frank Zappa's song "Dumb All Over" comes to mind.) Look at eastern India the past few days where Moslems and Hindus are killing each over local religious myths (a local mosque versus a Hindi shrine site).
The basic premise of the film is historically true - that Roman-occupied Israel and Judea were crawling with fanatics claiming to be the Messiah, and fanatic cults were springing up left and right. Jesus was just one of many, and it is a miracle of sorts that somehow his message was the one that got through in the end, rather than his times being just remembered as a crazy, revolutionary time where lots of people died for often very bizarre beliefs.
If Python had just made a serious film about this topic, most people wouldn't bother seeing it and it would be dismissed as propaganda of the liberal media. But through humor, the film has become much more popular and allows more people to approach a dangerous topic (Are you
sure the Book of Leviticus is the best way to govern modern social relations?) and think about it.
