Isn't this about the third time in a month when a news report can be answered by a Monty Python skit? Anyway, off to my job at the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Big fan, big fan. Top notch blog.

Big fan.

Actually, I think most of life fits into one Python sketch or another. That's because the Pythons didn't really invent situations - they merely took real life and pushed it to a sublime level of absurdity.

Some of it gets lost. One of my favorite sketches is when John Cleese tries to buy a cat license because the man from the cat-detector van told him to. What a lot of Americans might miss is that in the U.K., one had to have a license to own a color television set and pay a yearly fee on it. Vans would actually go around monitoring for unlicensed color television viewing. I swear I am not making this up.

Now I'm trying to determine where Bill fits in to all this. At the moment I'm thinking Mr. I.N.D.C. Gumby.

I would have gone with a "Pinky and the Brain" reference, myself.

Narf!

Most of the Pythons' American fans, me included, thought their humor was much sillier and surreal than it actually was. Actually, it was very solidly rooted in everyday British life, and much of it was thinly veiled rage.

I didn't really get this until I was older and saw The Life of Brian and the The Meaning of Life. Tom Sharpe's books give you a similar sense that life in 1970s Britain wasn't exactly a day at the beach.

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