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The Limits of Horatio’s Philosophy
KURT SMITH
What I Think My Chapter May Be About
A working-class woman (Eric Idle) sits on a bench in the park. She is approached by another woman (Michael Palin), also working-class, who pushes a dolly on which sits a brand new automobile engine, wrapped in a red bow. “Morning Mrs. Gorilla,” says the woman sitting on the bench. “Morning Mrs. Non-Gorilla,” replies the woman with the dolly. She sits down on the bench. “You been shopping?” asks Mrs. Non-Gorilla. “No . . . been shopping,” replies Mrs. Gorilla. “Did you buy anything?” asks Mrs. Non-Gorilla, her eyes fixed on the dolly. “A piston engine,” says Mrs. Gorilla with some excitement. “What did you buy that for?” “Oohh,” Mrs. Gorilla sings with confidence, “. . . it was a bargain!” “Oohh,” sings Mrs. Non-Gorilla. “Oohh” Mrs. Gorilla adds, as the camera pans right.
We see another working-class woman (Terry Jones) sitting on a bench. She is luring birds towards her, “Chirp, chirp, chirp . . . come on little birdies; come and see what mommy’s got for you . . . tweetie, tweetie. Come on little birdies . . . .” She reaches into a grocery bag, takes out a pork roast, and heaves it violently at the birds. The satisfaction on her face reveals that she has pegged one of the buggers. She again calls nicely to the birds, “Come on little birdies . . . ,” reaches into the bag, this time pulling out a large can of (diced?) pineapples, and heaves it at the birds. Again, her face reveals success. We are shown the scene from her point of view: dead birds and groceries are scattered about the pond’s bank.
A woman (Graham Chapman) approaches, also working-class, who pushes a dolly on which sits a brand new automobile engine (also wrapped in a red bow). “Hello Mrs. Smoker,” says the woman with the groceries. “Hello Mrs. Non-Smoker,” replies the woman with the dolly. She sits. “What . . . you been shopping then?” asks Mrs. Non-Smoker. “No,” replies Mrs. Smoker, “I’ve been shopping.” “Oh, what’d you buy?” asks Mrs. Non-Smoker, her eyes fixed on the dolly. “A piston engine,” says Mrs. Smoker with excitement. “What’d you buy that for?” asks Mrs. Non-Smoker. “It was a bargain!” replies Mrs. Smoker. “How much you want for it?” asks Mrs. Non-Smoker. “Three quid,” says Mrs. Smoker without hesitation. “Done,” replies Mrs. Non-Smoker. “Right,” replies Mrs. Smoker. Mrs. Non-Smoker counts an imaginary three quid and gives it to Mrs. Smoker. She looks at her newly purchased piston engine with delight. A subtle wave of confusion washes over her face. “How do you cook it?” she asks. “You can’t cook it,” replies Mrs. Smoker sternly. “You can’t eat that raw,” replies Mrs. Non-Smoker, even more sternly. “Oohh, . . .” ponders Mrs. Smoker, “I never thought of that.”
Both sit thinking about the present problem, when all of a sudden Mrs. Smoker matter-of-factly blurts out: “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!” Without skipping a beat Mrs. Non-Smoker replies, “And therefore as a stranger welcome it. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Her face reveals that she is experiencing a profound state of confusion, for she does not know the origin of her words. Yet, she continues, “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right! Nay, come, let’s go together.” The two women rise, looking about dazed and confused, and walk away—leaving the dolly and piston engine behind.
The above skit, “Piston Engine (a Bargain),” comes from Episode 43 (“Hamlet”) of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Its absurdity makes it one of my favorites. “Been shopping?” asks one woman. “No, been shopping,” answers the other. A natural reaction to hearing this is to ask: Are they not listening to what the other is saying? Are they just going through the motions of a polite greeting? Perhaps. But what Mrs. Non-Gorilla says, namely, “It is not the case that I’ve been shopping and I’ve being shopping” is a logical contradiction. This aside, what we really want to know is why these women are lugging around piston engines (gift-wrapped no less). They bought them? Why? As Mrs. Non-Gorilla says, “It was a bargain!” To be sure, this could be counted as a reason for buying the engine, but if this is the only reason it is certainly the wrong one. What’s with the one woman who kills birds? Has she gone insane? What are we to make of their sudden recital of Hamlet, Act I, Scene V? What are they to make of it? (That these women recite the play is surely connected to the fact that the episode is centered around Hamlet. Even so, knowing this will not answer the questions that I want to raise below.)
One wonders whether in the end it is best to accept the absurdity, as Mrs. Smoker and Mrs. Non-Smoker seem to do when they walk away, and laugh. For my part, I like this option. But, the editors of this book tell me that I had better opt for making something else of such skits. To clinch the deal, they recently sent out email letting contributors know that if the book were to sell, and I mean sell big, each author of a chapter would receive a couple of hundred bucks. That was certainly enough to motivate me to make something of the piston engine skit. What I am to make of it exactly, of course, is the rub.
I am a scholar of early modern philosophy by trade, or at least this is what I tell family, friends, students, and of late, police officers. Originally for this book I had worked up a scholarly piece on an eighteenth-century theory of humor, wit, raillery, satire, and ridicule, written by the British economist Corbyn Morris.15 The idea behind the essay was to take a bunch of Monty Python skits set in the eighteenth century and apply Morris’s theory. The theory, of course, would tell us whether Monty Python was funny—at least, whether the skits would have been considered funny by eighteenth-century standards. I was secretly hoping that the theory would not find the skits to be funny, in which case I would be able to spin the piece as a study of comical irony. But, alas, an application of the theory showed that the goddamned pieces would have been a smashing success, as the Brits would put it. So, there went the irony angle.
As I worked more on Morris’s little essay in which he expounds his theory, I began to wonder why he ever found it necessary to write and publish it. After all, it isn’t an obvious thing for an economist to be publishing. I was also interested in finding out more about this guy to whom Morris dedicates the essay—one Robert Earl of Orford. “Who the hell was this guy?” I wondered. As it turns out, Robert Earl of Orford is Sir Robert Walpole, who was none other than the very first British Prime Minister (well, not in the contemporary sense of Prime Minister). He’s sort of like the British counterpart to the United States’s George Washington. At first I was a bit embarrassed to discover this because it revealed how little I know about British history. But, the embarrassment quickly faded, for what the hell do I care about that? But, I digress.
According to Morris, Walpole’s mastery of wit was known worldwide. He apparently used his wit and debating skills to pull some sort of Jedi mind trick on Parliament to pass the infamous Licensing Act of 1737, which served to censor the content of plays performed in London’s theaters. As S.H. Wood puts it:Annoyed by the rude and abusive language of The Vision of the Golden Rump . . . Walpole was able to persuade them to pass the 1737 Licensing Act. In future all new plays and any alteration to old ones had to be sent to the Lord Chamberlain for approval, and playhouses were restricted to the City of Westminster. Other theatres needed parliamentary sanction, which enabled Walpole to shut down the most troublesome.16
Golden Rump? What the . . . ? “This could be good,” I thought to myself. But as it turns out, the term ‘Rump’ refers to some group of old-school loyalists who constituted the “tail end” of the old something or other and made some political hay in Parliament—or some such. The play was apparently a satire about that. Boring. Prior to my discovering this, I thought for about five minutes or so that the play was about a golden ass whose thing was the having of visions. This, of course—not so boring!
I was convinced now more than ever that the British colonies living in North America were justified in their revolt against British rule, until I recalled that not twenty-two years after
the birth of the United States, John Adams, then U.S. President, signed into law The Sedition Act of 1798, which did pretty much the same thing as the British Licensing Act of 1737. It made it illegal to say or write anything that insulted or made fun of the President. One difference, however, was that the truth could be used in one’s defense. And so, if the President really was a cross-dresser or was too fat to ride a horse, one might be able to sidestep trouble (when depicting him as a fat-non-horse-riding-cross-dresser). Strangely enough, The Sedition Act did not say anything about insulting the Vice President, which at the time was Adams’s nemesis, Thomas Jefferson. Apparently one could have a field day with him.
Like Adams, Walpole was uptight or something, and many of England’s playwrights of the time included Walpole-like characters in their plays. Henry Fielding’s plays in particular satirized Walpole. Fielding’s work suffered so greatly as a result of the Licensing Act that he turned from writing plays to writing novels. But as Morris suggests, the sort of shock felt by the entertainment business was well-deserved. He writes:The infamous insults there [in the theaters] offered upon all Decency, cried aloud for a Remedy.—For these profligate Attacks made Impressions more deep and venomous than Writings; As they were not fairly addressed to the Judgment, but immediately to the Sight and the Passions; for were they capable of being answered again, but by erecting an opposite Stage of Scurrility. (Morris, p. x)
The power of the stage was so great that it threatened Walpole’s tenure as Britain’s Minister. In light of the Licensing Act, Morris seemed to have thought that a line needed to be drawn between political satire on the one hand, and malice, libel, and treason on the other. Fixing the standards of humor, wit, raillery, satire, and ridicule—that is, fixing them as political, legal, and even moral concepts—appears to be Morris’s real motive for publishing the essay. Even so, in a careful read of the essay, one gets the feeling that Morris was more interested in setting standards of humor that were compatible with the Licensing Act than he was in setting out a defense of humor.
Understanding the larger picture now, and coming to grips with the fact that the Golden Rump wasn’t about a golden rump, I decided to abandon the historico-philosophical angle all together. At least, I decided to abandon the focus on the eighteenth century. I was a fish out of water—a fish nevertheless looking to make a quick couple of hundred bucks.
Freed from my scholarly chains, I began to consider possible ‘artistic’ ways by which I might approach a study of Monty Python. I had an idea! Following a paper writing strategy that I had learned from my students, I quickly got online and visited a site that sports a well-known essay generator. It immediately generated for me an essay titled, “Realities of Fatal Flaw: Capitalist Discourse and Textual Theory,” the first section of which was titled, “Neotextual Narrative and Sartreist Existentialism.” This was like stealing postmodern candy from a computational-based-essay-writing baby. It was a bit of work, but I read the thing in one sitting. The second section titled “Realities of Collapse” was especially difficult. I got to the end of the essay only to find an important notice, which read: “The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator.” This was difficult to believe, for I swear that I almost understood what A. David Cameron, University of Illinois (who was listed as the essay’s author), was getting at. Be that as it may, my artistic vision was almost complete! My hope was to use the postmodern generator’s essay and act postmodernly, giving it the title: “This is Not an Essay, It Just Looks Like One.” But, I was immediately reminded of the 1926 surrealist painting Ceci n’est pas une Pipe, painted by some guy from Belgium. So, the idea of a joke essay was quickly coming to an end. As much as it grieved me, I would have to say something interesting about Monty Python. Perhaps I would return to those women with their piston engines.
Wittgenstein and Meaning: The Absurd and The Funny
It’s well known that Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) had once forwarded a theory of meaning that took hold of Moritz Schlick and the philosophers of the Vienna Circle. It has come to be called the “Verification Principle,” which says: The meaning of a sentence is determined by its method of verification. And though Wittgenstein repeatedly denied ever having said anything like this to Schlick or to members of the Vienna Circle, this apparently has not changed the fact that it is well known that he did say it.17 The idea of the Verification Principle is that the meaning of a sentence is determined by the various ways one could take to determine the truth of the sentence. Of course, there are some snags here. For instance, the principle itself is not subject to verification. And so, as some have argued, if we are to believe what the principle tells us, we must conclude that it is meaningless, in which case we should un believe it, to use a phrase from some unknown philosopher whose name I am forgetting at the moment. Be that as it may, let’s look at the piston engine skit in light of this principle.
Mrs. Non-Gorilla asks, “Been shopping?” Mrs. Gorilla answers, “No . . . been shopping.” As I suggested earlier, I take it that the latter amounts to saying: “It is not the case that I’ve been shopping and I’ve been shopping.” This is a logical contradiction; and so, it is false. It cannot be true. Verification here is a moot point. Now, if there is no way by which one could verify the sentence uttered by Mrs. Gorilla, then according to the principle, it seems to follow that the sentence is not false after all, but meaningless. At least, according to at least one biographer, this is one gloss of what Wittgenstein might say (Wittgenstein says about the proposition “This circle is 3 cm long and 2 cm wide” that it is not false, but nonsensical (Monk, p. 286).) Even so, Wittgenstein states in the Tractatus: “The proposition shows what it says, the tautology and the contradiction [on the other hand] that they say nothing. . . . Tautology and contradiction are, however, not nonsensical; they are part of the symbolism. . . .”18 Their meaning, if we want to call it that, is merely formal. And so, we might say that even though the sentence that Mrs. Gorilla utters has meaning (though only formally), it is for all that empirically empty. In other words, she cannot be taken to be saying anything about the world. I think that we could take this a step further and claim that although the sentence she utters has meaning, Mrs. Gorilla isn’t saying anything at all! Admittedly, this on its surface seems a bit odd, and I will return to it shortly. Before I do, it is worth noting that the same sort of oddity can be found in what Mrs. Smoker utters in reply to Mrs. Non-Smoker. This second exchange has an additional twist. For example, in answer to Mrs. Non-Smoker’s question about how one cooks the piston engine, Mrs. Smoker says, “You can’t cook that!” This, it seems to me, is true and can be verified. Mrs. Non-Smoker replies, “You can’t eat that raw!” This, too, is true and can be verified. So, now we have a couple of sentences that can be verified—or, at least there is a sense in which they can. Even so, is their meaning really determined by the ways that we would go about verifying them? For instance, is the meaning of Mrs. Non-Smoker’s reply simply our being able to verify that one cannot eat a piston engine raw? Perhaps. But, this seems so only if she is simply asserting a fact. Of course, the joke is made in her appearing to do just this!
With the exception of the contradictions already considered, we can easily agree that every statement made in the dialogue is true, or at least verifiably true. Even so, the conditions that underwrite their truth, and the ways by which we would verify their truth, do not appear to account for why what the women are saying is absurd (or funny). For, the joke of the skit is that even though we completely understand the meanings of their sentences, we cannot make heads or tails of what they are saying. As I mentioned above, the difference being drawn here is admittedly odd. Although I’ll not be able to make it look less odd, I think that I can make it a bit clearer.
For starters, then, imagine that we meet for coffee and you say, “Hello, good to see you,” and I extend out my hand, my eyes sort of wide open as I stare at it, and utter, “This is my hand.” Although
you clearly understand the meaning of the sentence I just uttered (it isn’t as though I uttered, “Gobily gook muk not me fancy cakes”), my guess is that for all that you would nevertheless find my uttering “This is my hand” here a bit creepy. Rush Rhees has an answer as to why you would:But “what it makes sense to say” is not “the sense these expressions have.” It has more to do with what it makes sense to answer or what it makes sense to ask, or what sense one remark may have in connexion with another.19
Monty Python and Philosophy Page 5