Monty Python and Philosophy by Gary L. Hardcastle Page B

ridiculous behavior of his empire’s foreign subjects. Yes, the foreigners have silly beliefs and customs; it hardly matters. But let them misuse the mother tongue and, well, they’re in for a good thrashing. It is little known that the actual cause of the American Revolution was an intense desire on the part of the British to teach table manners to the colonists. Not the Battle of Yorktown but our utter incompetence at eating peas off the convex curve of a fork led the British to give up on civilizing us. We would have to improve ourselves after 1783.
    But our superior masters, Roman or British, ask no more of us than they ask of themselves—not one of the Queen’s native subjects
can possibly fail to see his own Latin teacher in Cleese’s centurion, nor fail to see himself in Brian’s own cowering submission to correction. Romanes eunt domus? I think not. A hundred times on the blackboard and no blood pudding. And of course, if Americans had anything like the British confidence of civilized superiority, they wouldn’t make such a fuss about being the greatest nation since 1066. Americans go on so much about it just because they know it isn’t true. Don’t be misled by a few simplified spellings, you self-appointed purveyors of American superiority. You know you love the Queen. You know you do. Praise Brian for the self-loathing Canadians. With them around at least Americans can feel superior to one other passel of British subjects. Now have some back bacon and return to your seat.
    But there is more to it. One thing that is utterly lost on American audiences is how the Pythons use British class-consciousness as a continual source of contextual humor. Apart from the social situations themselves, the class consciousness is mainly conveyed by the various accents adopted by the Python characters, all the way from Terry Jones’s shrillest cockney up to John Cleese’s Oxbridge titter. It is no accident that the individual Pythons tend to occupy roles that cast them within the same class range of British society (with some small social mobility). But a lot of their posture towards all things British has to do with the re-enactment of their own class forms, made comic. It is the very rigidity of British class consciousness that creates the comic context.
    And here we draw closer to the true secret that was revealed to me by God. The British understand the Romans so well because they built an empire to rival Rome’s own—not only by organizational genius, or an unfailing sense of what is and is not important, or by a perfect confidence in their own superiority, but also by sheer self-mastery and utter repression of all emotional weaknesses. So, four weapons. Five is right out. And the unexpected gift that accompanies these repressions is, surprisingly, an ability on the part of Romans and Britains to laugh at themselves . Americans simply don’t possess this capacity, at least not qua American. The British, like the Romans, are fascinated with how well they can mock themselves. Americans, lacking the needed detachment, become unconscious of their own pathos. The Americans may laugh at the British, but not at themselves, and which is the greater virtue? This is why Americans could never
have built the empire they now enjoy at the beneficent noblesse oblige of their British cousins (shame that the French got that phrase when the British own the virtue). Americans do not want to suffer for the sake of imparting higher culture to a barbaric world. They want to make money and B movies and live in Florida. Only their own comfort, security and wealth moves them in any serious way. Yes, yes, democracy, freedom, things of that nature, but it’s not like we will hop in our boats and go off to create it (not really). The British and the Romans willingly ordered their societies in ways as repressive to themselves as to those they conquered for the sake of civilizing the world, and without a moment’s doubt that they were the ones