A serious idea about Monty Python's humor
From 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail':
"The Gorge of Eternal Peril"
On it's face this is a very straight forward trope: You fail to answer 3 questions right, you get thrown down into The Gorge of Eternal Peril, where you die a miserable death... Or do you? The idea has been suggested to me by a friend of mine that when you enter the gorge of eternal peril, aptly, you must be in mortal danger for eternity. So, you don't age, and you never die because dying would mean you are no longer in peril of dying. The name 'Gorge of Eternal Peril' creates a paradox, but it is naver tackled, never elaborated on and never highlighted in any way. The Monty Python guys just put it in there, maybe as an inside joke, and left it there, innocuously.
Over the years I found two more examples of this type of what I like to call transhumor:
From 'Monty Python's The Meaning of Life':
"At least I don't work for Jews"
Maria, the cleaning woman of the restaurant where many of the movie's skits converge, has a long and extenssive intellectual background. She worked as a cleaning woman in the Académie Française, the library of the Prado Museum, the Library of Congress and The Bodleian Library. When she worked in the British Museum she claims to have read "every volume through" (which would be quite an impossible feat even if all she ever did was read, and she also had to keep the place clean). And so, having been cultured in some of the most prominent institutions of learning in the entire world, what makes her feel better about her life? The fact that she's not working for Jews. That is a brilliant punchline in and of its own, but it still took me years to figure out how ludicrous it would be for a woman so well-educated to have bigoted feelings. After all, the more you know about the world the less likely you are to otherize a fellow human being, and yet, there's Maria.
From 'Monty Python's The Meaning of Life':
"A tiger in Africa?"
When I first watched this skit, I wasn't even 10 y/o I think, so I had no way of knowing the stuffy English officers were actually making a good point. These days the common person in the west is a lot more educated about taxonomy than we were back in 1983, and still, many people even today confuse leopards and tigers.
These three examples are essentially different, but they still have one thing in common: When you laugh at them, you're really laughing at yourself for not getting the real joke.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
-Leo Tolstoy share