late night monty python

[walkitout]

When I was quite young, PBS picked up Monty Python from the BBC. Well, for sure our local PBS station in Seattle did. My older sisters thought it was hilarious and I tagged along for long enough to start finding it really hilarious, too. I've watched Flying Circus episodes and Monty Python movies on and off over the ensuing decades but hadn't seen an animated sequence in several years. Then last night, I was watching a relatively ordinary Flying Circus animation when I had a really weird thought.

This is all gender-bender stuff. Like _all_ of it, one way or another. _Really_ queer, not just homosexual male stuff.

How I failed to notice _that_ I'll never know. Has everyone else been seeing this all along and I just missed it? I mean, The Lumberjack Song, that's pretty obvious. But the cartoons?

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I don't remember anything especially gender-bendery about the cartoons, except in the sense that surreal humor nearly always involves gender-bending somehow. I never paid all that much attention, though, as I liked the live-action stuff better. I always saw Monty Python as one of those male-oriented worlds where the men got the women's parts precisely because there weren't any women around, so you paradoxically saw them behaving in less stereotyped ways.

Also, of course, they're coming from the pantomime tradition in British humor, where the Ugly Sisters are all played by men and the Principal Boy is a woman.

[volkhvoi.livejournal.com]

When I saw Python in high school, I thought it was just silly (reenforced by those people who thought it was funny). Then I lived in the UK for a few years, and realized it was biting satire. I've *met* the parrot seller, in several incarnations. Sometimes "service" was something the customer provided.