Conservatives and Liberals Are Fighting Over Who Gets Monty Python Better
Are liberal snowflakes too sensitive to laugh at Terry Jones’ many gender-bending characters without crying about “transphobia,” or are conservatives too stupid to understand that those anarcho-syndicalist peasants from Monty Python and the Holy Grail were basically the medieval Antifa?
Sadly, we’ve reached the stage in the comedy culture wars where such questions apparently must be asked whenever John Cleese opens Twitter and participates in whichever political debate rages the loudest at the moment. Despite being best known for his work in the iconoclastic, anti-establishment and counter-cultural comedy troupe Monty Python, Cleese’s personal politics have been hard to keep straight in the last 10 years as he’s raged against the rise of “wokeness” on the U.K.’s version of Fox News while simultaneously criticizing the American alt-right and its figureheads in inflammatory Twitter threads like this one that went viral over the holiday weekend.
Don't Miss
On Monday, Cleese called out the Republican Party’s seemingly racially charged questioning of Democratic presidential nominee and current VP Kamala Harris’ place of birth and U.S. citizenship yesterday, thus opening the floodgates for both sides of the American political spectrum to try and co-opt the work of Monty Python for their cause before he exponentially exacerbated the argument by dropping this ambiguous bombshell:
Before we dive into the “Your mother was a hamster”-esque insults that both sides have been lobbing back and forth like they’re a Trojan Bunny, it’s worth clarifying that Cleese in no way speaks for the politics of Monty Python as a whole. Cleese and his old collaborator/frenemy Eric Idle have spent the last year-or-so publicly feuding while Idle roundly dismisses Cleese’s constant claims that wokeness has killed comedy. And, to be clear, Cleese’s apparent cozying-up to the culturally conservative starts and ends with his disdain for “cancel culture” (as well as the BBC). In fact, as early as this morning, Cleese has been spending most of his free time emphatically attacking former president Donald Trump and his followers while bragging about how the U.K. “just threw the Conservatives out, thank God.”
So, despite the efforts of far-right figures like Elon Musk to claim Cleese and all of Monty Python as early anti-woke, anti-transgender and pro-traditionalist icons, Cleese’s consistent criticism of modern conservatism doesn’t seem to suggest that he believes the half of America that “got” Monty Python was the entire GOP. Still, thanks to his rabid anti-wokeness, the online left can’t exactly claim Cleese either, so we’re stuck in this debate about which faction of our two-party system truly understands why those walks are so darn silly:
