Petrarchive – Monty Python

I'll join you in your small eulogy for the previous generation of geek that loved those annoying Monty Python references. My first introduction to it was from "theater kids", who are far from eSATA spec Gen X cable slingers but still belted the same lines all the same. Those theater kids did not have the context of Monty Python being a British humor show and simply enjoyed Monty Python - really mostly The Holy Grail - for its randomness. Because of this, and of course the geek culture miasma that you reference, that seemed so enveloping and everlasing back then, I despised even hearing the name, and stayed far away from watching anything Monty Python until enough time had passed when I could approach it in that said context, after having finished other classic British television series like Blackadder. Only after having separated myself as much as possible from any fan's zeal could I start to appreciate it on its own terms. I still would not say I love it dearly but it's a decently watchable collection in its own right.

I don't think the series will have any appeal to Gen Alpha because it requires a bare minimum of educational background to grasp, even without framing it in its 20th century British context. You need to have heard of the Spanish Inquisition to find the gag funny, or else it will come across as a Star Trek-esque imagining. You need to know a minimal amount of Biblical history to find anything Life of Brian funny. You need to know of Hungarian as a complicated, non-Indo European language, or at least the uphill climb of multilingual environments that would necessitate travelers' phraseboooks, to find the phrase 'hovercraft full of eels' funny. The theater kids around me who repeated Monty Python phrases ad infinitum didn't have that background knowledge either; though I hope they do now, and that their ignorance was a simple matter of age and geography (I won't do my usual song and dance here). I assume the same will happen to Gen Alpha. Maybe they will find the especially blunt and random moments of humor like the 'just a fleshwound' entertaining, funny enough to pass along on X-Discord or whatever monstrous platform comes next. But when clipped and placed in the contextless void for User Engagement, it is already past dead-- it is undead, and desecratory. Even humor can be desecrated, and we have found out how.

You skipped over Zoomers, those poor donkeys, have you already given up hope that they will encounter anything new, or do you think they are aware of Monty Python's nerd stench enough to stay away from it?

>>10240

For Zoomers, I imagine Monty Python is akin to Firefly or Super Mario RPG wherein those (relatively) older and digitally dominant were obsessed with to the point of putting off others.

>>10241
I can't blame them, as I went through basically the same thing. I never got around to those two you mentioned either, and many others in the geek stench cadre, for the same reason (SMRPG reminding me of Mother, which is probably a great game/s but I never want to hear about it again). I vehemently despise the obligation to consume some media just because others have, so I do not fault any zoomer or younger for not watching this or that just because. Monty Python is "worth it" because of its place in the British canon, definitely DESPITE its fanbase and not because of it.

>>10240
I skipped Gen Z because I am one, and while I think those of us who are older and have been online since we were quite young definitely felt the tail end of Monty Python's internet ubiquity. But this also spilled into the real world. I have an autistic cousin who was the stereotypical spergy Monty Python fan. So I think it's not necessarily even the case that you have to have been a redditor at 14 to have picked up that association.

Gen Alpha though have come onto the Internet only after covid so I'm confident that none of them will have those associations. I'm not actually sure what cultural artifacts they will associate with older aspies on the Internet. Tech nerds are so much smaller as a percentage of net users than even 10 years ago.

One thing to check out - it was a hit among the older members of my family - is The Goon Show. It's basically Monty Python's radio predecessor from the 1950s, and is quoted nowhere near as much since it's so much older. But it was cited by the Pythons as a direct influence and if you listen it's easy to see why; it's got a similar random, irreverent style of humor and lots of fantastical insane gags, many of which only work as radio performances. Like with Monty Python, the humor doesn't suffer nearly as much from being out of date as other shows from it's time.

Also check out Fawlty Towers; that was done by John Cleese and several others after Monty Python. While it was aired by US PBS stations at roughly the same time in the same time slots, quotes from it didn't make it into nearly as many USNET post signatures.