Cheerful Nihilism.

Rating: 7/10 (17 December 2011)

There's a scene in this send up of Biblical movies and stories that always gets a chuckle out of me. At the end, there are a dozen or so men strung up there and left to die on crosses. Brian, the protagonist, is one of them. He's done nothing to deserve it. His friends and rescuers have failed him. But his crucified neighbor sums up the most apt attitude by cheerfully advising Brian not to be so glum about it all. He begins to sing and whistle a song, "Always Look On The Bright Side of Life," that contains incongruous lyrics that are too vulgar to reproduce here. Not only, "Always look on the bright side of Death/ Just before you draw your terminal breath," but "Life's a piece of s***/ When you look at it...." Monty Python seem to me to have been entirely serious, amid the gaggle of gags, in skewering all of our intense dispositions to follow one or another social or religious movement. As far as I know they were only explicit about it in the penultimate scene of "The Meaning of Life," which wound up with an actor in drag advising us to try to be nice to one another. I think it was meant seriously.
But then there is often a momentous covert message behind some of the jokes. I'll give one example.
Brian, having been mistaken for a prophet in the Holy Land, runs down the streets followed by a gang of ardent worshippers and he accidentally loses his shoe and leaves it behind rather than be caught. The followers stop and gape at the shoe. One holds the shoe in the air and cries that Brian wants all of us to wear only one shoe. Another argues that it's not the shoe that's the sign, it's Brian's gourd that he left behind. An dispute ensues over whether it should be the shoe or the gourd. A joke, because the conflict lacks instrumental meaning -- except when you think of Sunni vs. Shi'ite in the Middle East, or Catholic vs. Protestant in Northern Ireland.
Some of the jokes are sillier than others, recalling Mel Brooks. Pilate has speech defect. His "r" comes out as "w", and the crowd keeps tricking him into calling out names with lots of "r"s in them, which convulses them with laughter. "Woger the Wobber!" he cries, and the crowd hoots and doubles over. His friend, Biggus Dickus, speaks with a lisp and is drawn into lengthy pronouncements containing "s". Well, I DID mention Mel Brooks.
It helps, though, if you're in the right mood for this nihilistic nonsense. Anything can happen. Anything goes. A man may jump from a tower and land in a space ship that happens to be speeding by. When the Roman guards find a rebel painting "Romans Go Home" (in Latin) on a wall, they don't arrest him. They correct his grammar and make him copy it one hundred times on the wall. (The Centurion, John Cleese, had attended prep school and Cambridge and had taught Latin.) I don't know how well that will go over with kids who never heard of using correct grammar, let alone in Latin, a notoriously synthetic language in which each word contains many morphemes. I swear there must be an agglutinative language somewhere in which you can say something like, "I'd rather watch television tonight than hang out at the Sonicburger" -- and it all comes out as one word.
Anyway, if you're in a mood to have your head taken and shaken back and forth a little, "The Life of Brian" might get the job done.