Their jokes about assigning gender to babies and to being transgender, dressing in drag, like all of it was a send-up.
Sure, they did punch down if you were a person who were in those groups, but the fact that it was large enough social event to be relevant enough to be a comedy skit on a television show or a movie seen by millions implies that there were some serious things going on back then that they could see and wanted to address.
What the hell was going on that put all of those things in their mind?
Check the history of comedy.
Mel Brooks ‘The Producers’ movie had two gay men. Bugs Bunny was in drag in the 1940’s. “Some Like It Hot” came out in the 1950s. Heck, pretty much any Hollywood movie made before the Hays Code would have had gay gags.
Milton Berle was the King of Comedy and he did drag for years.
The Pythons didn’t invent anything
This is why the whole woke thing is so stupid to me.
“I’m sick of Hollywood putting DEI bs in my movies not like the old days!”
The old days: “Come see two men dress as women to escape the mob!”
Since this is a comedy thread, I’ll paraphrase John Cleese.
The great thing about anger is that it really works. It makes you physically stronger and less likely to feel pain. If you’re angry all the time you aren’t worrying about things because you’ve got a target to go after.
I’ll throw in another comedy classic.
The musical “The Music Man” is about a conman who gets the whole town in an uproar over a pool table.
“Disney has gone woke”.
Meanwhile Mary Poppins (made in the 60’s) straight up has a banger song “sister suffragette” and signs for women’s suffrage in it.
“Disney has gone woke” has to be the stupidest thing to say, they’ve been woke longer than I’ve been around.
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I was there when the deep magic was written (or soon after to catch reruns), Monty Python was skewering the Post War Conservative British cultural zeitgeist in ways which audiences hadn’t quite seen before, through the lens of British toffs (oxford and cambridge) playing at being proletarians skewering toffs. It was different for British TV, but it was like a sea change when American audiences finally caught up and began taking notice. It was smart comedy, pointed, brutal, and hilarious. America wasn’t doing anything like this, at that time, going more for the broad jokes that would appeal to the lowest common denominator. Sure others have mentioned Brooks, and Berle, and Cartoons which had been sending up cultural norms for decades, but they weren’t Python, Python, at the time were a thing of their own. Monty Python’s Flying Circus ran from 1969 to 1974. Saturday Night Live started in 1975.
Let’s put this another way: why are the same routines from the 70s still relevant today? It’s like all the movements of one generation have had almost zero effect on society as a whole.
problem is the progress goes to about then. I have often commented that things have been going downhill post seventies but it was hard to notice for awhile and I would get blowback on how bad particular groups had it. Thing is they had it way worse in the 60s and the 50s and have seen little progress in the eighties onward. Feels to me like progress pretty much stopped or reverted since then on the environment, our infrastructure, and our social programs but like the few decades before had massive progress.
Think about this. Public sex clubs like ‘Plato’s Retreat’ and gay bath houses were mainstream in the 1970s. Bette Midler got her start performing at a gay bath house. There were porn theaters catering to couples all over the place. AIDS came along and threw everything back fifty years.
yeah and today we have roe vs wade thrown out and folks that are against condoms. ugh.
Hey, I’m against condoms. They suck, and don’t feel very good for anyone. That’s why I got sterilized, and when I was dating I got tested regularly and insisted on the same from my partner(s).
sorry. folks against condoms and all other forms of birth control.
I once read a novel from the 1970s. There were a couple of thugs who were arguing over who’d had more STIs. It was a simpler, happier time.
Never had one. If you get tested prior to each new partner, and require the same from them, it’s remarkably easy to avoid, as long as you don’t participate in hook-up culture.
The UK is an incredibly Classist society with a long-running “know your place” kind of mindset and very low Social Mobility for an European nation - people very much are defined by their class (all the way to ther being a very specific, non-regional, English language accent for the upper class) and one’s social class is very much inherited.
The 60s and the 70s were the peak point for the result of the post War (that being WWII) increase in social mobility in Britain with lots of Working Class lads and lasses making it big in, amongst others, the arts (and you see it not just in Comedy but also Acting more in general and especially in Music were almost every great British star from that age had working class origins).
All this has in the meanwhile being reversed, hence once again almost all modern British artists are the sons and daughters of the upper-middle and upper classes.
During that golden period the massive mix of people from all origins in the arts created all kind of original and “not knowing your place” art expressions, and I believe the Money Pythons are one of those.
Love seeing foreign people attempt to explain the culture of a country they’ve never been to.
That’s such an interesting statement.
Irrelevant for my post, since I lived in Britain for over a decade, but interesting.
Thank you for sharing that tidbit about yourself.
The queer community has been known and active for a very long time. The stonewall riots occured in 1969, making it prime time to make media about the LGBTQ community.
Drag mainly.
