A Book about the Film Monty Python's the Meaning of Life

May 11, 2020
Larsen (Monty Python’s Flying Circus), a film and animation professor at Brigham Young University, presents an exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting look at Monty Python’s last film, 1983’s The Meaning of Life. Larsen posits that the film is a pessimistic look at life during the time of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. For example, the film’s opening featurette of elderly office accountants rebelling against their corporate masters is a deep critique of America’s “financial dominance” of London, which created the conditions for Thatcher’s “strict sado-monetarist policies had proven so effective at reducing inflation, but also reducing employment.” No line in the film is without comment (some lines get a tedious multiparagraph examination). A brutal look at hospital childbirth in “Every Sperm Is Sacred” is shown to be a part of England’s 1980s debate “about skyrocketing health care costs and the seeming inability to control its spending or quality of care.” And the film’s final sketch, a parody of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, hammers on upper-middle-class Thatcherites diminishing the specter of Death by trying to treat him “as an adorable local.” Hard-core Monty Python fans will be thoroughly delighted, but those with a more casual interest would do fine sticking with the film.

July 24, 2020

In 1983, British comedy troupe Monty Python released their third and final theatrical release, Monty Python's the Meaning of Life, a series of sketches tracing life from birth to death and beyond. Their humor was satirical and surreal, laced with cultural and historical references and clearly written by smart people who enjoyed being very silly. Larsen (A Book About the Film Monty Python's Life of Brian) meticulously dissects the film scene by scene (and often line by line), delving into what topics, including boarding schools or tinned salmon, would have meant to the Pythons and also how they would have been received by 1980s film audiences. A sketch on the Zulu War, for example, would have called to mind the twilight of the British Empire, the previous year's Falklands War, and recent earnest films about the war. Larsen isn't seeking to amplify the film's humor; instead he's edifying the reader. Beyond capturing the zeitgeist through the use of contemporary references, he uses scenes from the film as entry points to limn British history. He admits the Pythons may not have always intended allegory, but Larsen can use their material to discuss the austerity of postwar Britain, the rise of Margaret Thatcher, or the coal mining industry. VERDICT Larsen teeters between exhaustive and exhausting in this comprehensive approach to drawing meaning from The Meaning of Life. For die-hard Monty Python fans.--Terry Bosky, Madison, WI

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