Life of Brian: the debate reconsidered

Are there legitimate criticisms to be made of Monty Python's controversial 1979 film?

This essay is a ‘crossing of the floor’ for me: here, I change my mind about Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), but more specifically a historiography that grew up around it, which cast the film’s critics as closed-minded bigots and the Pythons themselves as conscientious moderates who were crucified for simply making a point about groupthink. Not only do I now think there is a great deal to be said in criticism of the film, but I think some defences of the film by the Pythons were disingenuous, even to the point of confabulating a small patch of history, which I hope here to dig up.

Like any volte-face, I could not have imagined doing it before I did. Growing up, the film mattered a great deal to me, because it mattered to my family - my Dad’s side in particular, with whom I parroted its lines endlessly. They ensured I watched it, as if it was some great rite of passage, and I suppose I did watch it terribly early, and fell into line by holding it to be impeccable satire. I adored the history of the film too, and knew everything about how it was made from scouring the apocrypha, in the form of biographies and documentaries, and savouring the mock-heroic stories - of how it had all almost fallen through due to an American studio withdrawing their backing at the last moment (due to fears of a Christian backlash), and how a Beatle had stepped in to fund it instead; how a great British comedy paterfamilias, Spike Milligan, just happened to be in Tunisia during filming, and given a kind of authorising, ‘laying on of hands’ via a spontaneous cameo. It was the stuff of pop culture legend.

Perhaps there’s no bore like an old clown. Does my reappraisal of Brian represent Christianity’s final victory over my old self? Has every last particle of the fun-lovin’ aspiring comic been completely subbed out for this doctrinaire, reactionary Catholic? Is this my most foolish essay so far? True enough, unqualified fondness for Life of Brian, and what it represents, nestles far more comfortably on different mental climes to where I sit these days. It perches best, of course, on the New Atheistic or historical materialist branch I used to occupy, where Christianity is regretted as the locus classicus of ‘closed systems of thought’. It can fall one branch down and perch, as I did, on liberal Protestantism too (make of that what you will). Much praise of the film actually stems from these quarters of the church. Take one commentator, in the Liberation Theology tradition:

In different ways all four gospels concentrate on de-idolising or even de-ideologising contemporary perceptions concerning how the Messiah should act. Many of the conflicts which occur between Jesus and the religious authorities of his time stem from his refusal to act according to their preconceptions of how the Messiah should behave. Thus, like all good comedy, Life of Brian is very serious, for it forces us to re-consider our own images of the Messiah, our own understandings of who Jesus is and how he should be followed.

Tim Noble, ‘“He’s not the Messiah!”: Two negative film Christologies’ in Communio Viatorum 51/1 (2009),89-105, p. 93

How possible such de-ideologisation is - and how legitimate the solutions of the learned theologians for achieving it - is a thornier point for me. Nonetheless, Noble showcases some of the fawning that can take place over Life of Brian in some Christian circles. He even esteems it over Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), a film he dismisses as sub-Christian Manichaeism on account of its depictions of Satan as a rival prince (I wonder quite what he would make of St John’s Gospel). It is coded as high-status to ‘get’ Python as an enlightened, modern Christian.

So it was for me. But I felt something give last week. Why has it taken so long? I suppose when we change a belief we have, a ripple occurs. We think things in a connected way - one idea is always linked to another, and to another. We do not believe ‘the sky is blue’ as an atomic fact, as if it is some hard and fundamental piece of mental furniture. This fact, ‘the sky is blue’, in itself is a composite: a tissue of intersecting, interpenetrating beliefs to do with colour, empiricism, cosmology, and so on. Our total network of ideas - the sum of our opinions, beliefs, and dearly-held personal experiences - is like a delicate cobweb. As we go on in life, we try to stitch in new findings into the tapestry of the mind that has been created so far. Incorporating these new ideas can be easy, of course. A person whose fundamental attitude towards the world is already conspiratorial and cynical is likely to find a new story about a rather fabulous government coverup rather congenial to their thought-web as it is. The ripple caused by the new stitching is minor, and does not disrupt the standing structure.

But some shifts in belief cause, by chain reaction, far greater shifts elsewhere. The cobweb of the mind is torn apart perhaps by a new epiphanic experience in an instant. Some drastic recontouring might take place over years, as corollaries force their way down the chain with knock-on effect. So it has been for me with Life of Brian. Deep concerns about this film and the legends it has engendered have, so to speak, been put in the post for me. Perhaps this essay is an unnecessary voicing of them; time and fate have done their work, and now it doesn’t take any smartarsery from me to refute the film’s premiss - that a nonreligious, ‘common sense’ viewpoint is possible, if we could only just shake off the delusions of the former generation. As we see from Python members and their continued dialogue with culture, yesterday’s radicals so quickly become today’s reactionaries, and now it is the likes of John Cleese who must be cast as the reactionary. There is no getting away from ‘closed systems of thought’, because there is nothing else for embodied, language-using creatures such as ourselves. We are all, in the end, priests of some holy name or other; servants of some ideal.

To make things even more niche, my discussion will be centred around an infamous debate that took place on television shortly after the release of Life of Brian in 1979, and which allows us a more manageable sample of the issues at stake, and of the criticisms that Monty Python sought to deflect. The segment featured on BBC’s Friday Night, Saturday Morning, and was hosted during that time by Tim Rice (the Jesus Christ, Superstar lyricist). On 9^th November 1979, John Cleese and Michael Palin faced their critics: Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark.

What many people will provide when prompted to remember something about this legendary interview is an impression, rather than any specific lines: it was two crusty old farts with closed minds, playing the gallery with cheap shots, while the two intelligent comedians tried earnestly to address serious issues. It was a clash of generations, in which the old came across as intellectually lightweight, and the young, refreshingly free from dogma. Take a relatively recent BBC article on the history of the film’s reception:

Cleese and Palin did the debating, while Muggeridge and Stockwood sneered at them and their “10th-rate film”. Again, the long-winded condescension of a pair of ageing grandees didn’t deter audiences.

But why exactly do we have this clear impression? For Muggeridge - the former Punch satirist turned watchdog for Christian orthodoxy, and who, three years after the broadcast, would convert to Catholicism - the shoe fits. But Bishop Stockwood, a closeted homosexual and outspoken campaigner for the radical left, would surely get a more sympathetic hearing these days, though he was, even in the debate, a little too invested in the minutiae of English public school and Oxbridge. Mind you, so were the Pythons - so why is it so irresistible to think of Team Muggeridge-Stockwood as the pair of old codgers who utterly embodied the problems that Brian so wittily illuminated? I think Peter Webster, giving a historian’s take on his personal website, has this right: due to the rise of DVD extras, documentaries and autobiographies in the intervening years, Life of Brian is a good example of a piece of modern media over which the creators, through talking heads and published diaries, have exerted long-range interpretive control.

For all the sound and fury, the episode might have disappeared from public consciousness, had it not been for technological change and the retrospective assembling of a ‘history of Python’ on the Pythons’ own terms, in which the episode assumed a prominent place.

‘St Mugg, the Bishop, and the Pythons: an Encounter Reborn’, 2020

He notes that it is the Pythons who have always managed the narrative around that interview - Muggeridge and Stockwood, at least from his own digging into memoirs and articles, never said another word about it. It was the recollection of Palin, Cleese, and even Terry Jones (someone who was not even there), that mattered to us all when reconstructing our collective memory of the televised debate. In fact, this is such a strong emphasis of the historiography, that even Webster himself, while expressly trying to revise the standard Pythonian account, repeats one ‘undisputed fact’ about the interview without any scepticism: that Muggeridge and the Bishop had missed the first fifteen minutes of their Life of Brian screening earlier that day, and had therefore not grasped the fundamental narrative gimmick shown at the start - that Jesus and Brian were on parallel tracks within the film’s fictional universe.

I have believed that Muggeridge and the Bishop were late to their screening of Life of Brian my whole life. When the Pythonian history was dramatised by the BBC (a one-off episode, Holy Flying Circus, 2011), it was included in the events there as an established fact. But this week a question finally occurred to me: what if it just isn’t true? What if Muggeridge and Stockwood weren’t late to their showing? When you watch the Friday Night, Saturday Morning broadcast, the idea that Muggeridge and the Bishop po-facedly believe that Brian just ‘is’ Jesus suddenly becomes very hard to sustain, or, at least, becomes irrelevant. Their complaints against the film are just not of that ilk. They continuously and passionately make bigger historical points: “If Jesus of Nazareth had never existed, then this figure of Brian would never have been produced” says the Bishop, surely on a different argumentative plane to one regarding a simple mix-up of dramatis personae. Muggeridge repeatedly insists that the issue with the film is that it is a parasite on the foundational story of our civilisation - the Life of Brian is popular only because it draws from the imaginary of the most beloved story the West possesses. It is ‘stealing’ from the source of the Sistine Chapel; it is scoring cheap laughs off the thing that gets Mother Teresa out of bed in the morning. Muggeridge and Stockwood are emphatically not just peddling the line that Brian is supposed to be Jesus, and that it is blasphemous to ridicule Jesus, and that therefore the film is in poor taste. That is never their argument, though perhaps in the minds of humanistic polemicists, it was assumed to be, and a story about their missing the start of the film fitted this interpretation.

The criticisms Muggeridge and Stockwood actually make are perfectly valid to me. A separate actor for Jesus doesn’t totally absolve Life of Brian from the charge that it sets out to insult the central figure of Christian worship, because the Brian narrative so doggedly makes the case that all such figures of worship are merely a product of human projection and deluded retrofitting. It is precisely Brian-as-doppelgänger - not identical with Jesus - that makes the film such a jab at Christian faith, and it is disingenuous of Cleese and Palin to suggest otherwise. If the film giveth with a innocuous shot of Jesus serenely delivering the Beatitudes, it taketh away with having Brian Messianified against his will by self-serving followers, in a way which effectively retracts whatever lip service is paid to Christian sensitivity elsewhere.

The Brian narrative acts out a certain, ideologically coloured reconstruction of what the genesis of a religion is like. And is the reconstruction that the film sketches out a fair one? That, of course, is something worth arguing about, and to do so does not entail that one is necessarily some theocratic fideist, who cannot bear to think outside of their thought bubble. There just are really good things to be said against the scholarly trends that Life of Brian draws on. And that they do drawn on them is obvious; the Pythons show their hand on this many times in the exchange. They had clearly been studying some popular-level arguments from text-critical and sociology-of-religion scholars that would become quickly outdated and seen as unduly sceptical even before the close of the century. Cleese thinks that the case for Christian faith in the 20^th century can be settled quite simply: every man must “sort it out for himself… he would have to, for example, work out… does one accept every word in the Bible - the Sermon on the Mount, did they get it all right when Mark [he presumably means St Matthew] wrote it down 30 years later?”. One might agree with Cleese’s loaded portrayal of the fundamental questions here, but my point is that his assumptions and conclusions about biblical interpretation are more than legitimately contestable. Many respectable scholars today would not, for instance, triumphantly set the dates so distantly, nor ignore the possibility of an intervening oral culture to connect Christ’s ministry with the first written accounts. It is now the preening confidence of a ‘scientific approach’ to biblical studies that seems so parochial and unjustifiable, and it is ecclesially centred interpretations of Scripture that once again seem solid, organic, and not beholden to those fleeting trends that turn out not to be vaut le détour.

James Crossley, on a deep dive into the Pythons’ use of gospel scholarship during the writing of Brian, summarises it well:

[The Life of Brian] subtly but clearly takes up some of the more challenging reconstructions of the historical Jesus from popular and scholarly thought and applies them to Brian. The physical Jesus in the film may be the Christ of faith who is never directly challenged but this Christ of faith is undermined by the portrayal of Brian who is, in effect, the historical Jesus of more mildly subversive imaginations

(James Crossley, ‘Life of Brian or Life of Jesus? Uses of Critical Biblical Scholarship and Non-orthodox Views of Jesus in Monty Python’s Life of Brian’ in Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception 1, no 1 (2011) 93-114, p. 114).

Again though, Crossley repeats the line that Muggeridge and the Bishop definitely missed the start of the film, a fact which contributes, in his view, to their sketchy performance. How deep this myth goes! And what is the evidence for it, when all is said and done? Michael Palin is the first to surmise that an overrunning meal caused the critics to miss the start of their showing. He gains this understanding after chatting to Muggeridge and Stockwood in the green room afterward the debate; Cleese and Jones repeat it as bona fide, with no caveat that it could simply have been Palin’s misapprehension. Having lost confidence in the idea myself after viewing the debate afresh, I was stunned by this (admittedly unverified) source - a blog post by David Grace who maintains he saw Muggeridge and Stockwood going into their film on time in 1979. I see no reason for presuming duplicity or misapprehension - the writer is not trying to defend the men, and recalls very vividly seeing them en route to their screening:

It can't have been a lunch [that made them late], unless it was an exceptionally good one, but may have been an early dinner. But if that's so, what did they do between when I saw them going in and the start of the film? They would have been in time for the adverts run by Pearl & Dean, let alone the start of the film.

It is seriously time to revisit our feelings on the Python-Muggeridge-Stockwood debate sans the idea that the Christians had missed the opening moments of Life of Brian, and examine how this pseudohistory may have stacked the interpretive deck against them. Without the skew, I think we will see that the criticisms they made of the film were not arrogant, nor superficial. They did not make cheap shots any more or less than the Pythons themselves, who were quite capable of working the crowd. And if Muggeridge and the Bishop could occasionally appear aloof or donnish, Cleese and Palin supplied a good measure of schoolboy upstartishness at times too. I cringed when Michael Palin, in his first salvo during the exchange, makes a bizarre sideswipe about the political views of Christians in an effort that would embarrass a secondary school debater: how is it, he asks haughtily and unrelatedly to the topic at hand, that the same Christians who can say their prayers every night can also be happy to have their money spent on ‘bombs’? The Bishop - himself a strident campaigner against war - asks quite plainly what his evidence is for this, which leaves Palin backpedalling and insisting he is making the point in humility.

Muggeridge, when the debate is viewed afresh, is not all patrician condescension, but paternal concern. He is trying to win these young men over to a vision of beauty and virtue but, like a father talking to a son, comes up against a different way of seeing things: “the thirty years war in Germany, the Inquisition and so forth?” snarks Cleese to Muggeridge’s rhapsodies about Christendom, head resting defiantly on his fist, to studio applause. Indeed, this encapsulates the tragedy of the debate: we have, here, two fundamentally different ways of paying attention to the Christian story. To the Pythons (as well as the host, Tim Rice) for example, the crucifixion was a quotidian event - a chance act of cruelty in a cruel world that can hardly be meaningful to anybody. Muggeridge is adamant that that is to miss the point - the unique suffering of Christ on the cross, contesting not merely for his own life but the life of the world, is the basis for all meaning. The futility of dialogue given these stark disagreements is manifested again and again.

As the debate finishes, and the audience begin their applause, you can just catch Muggeridge pleading with Cleese, not for audience point-scoring, but man-to-man, as an evangelist: “you are missing out on something”. He genuinely seems to regret that the two Pythons cannot see what he sees. Father-like, he sympathises tenderly when Cleese complains that the Clifton College of his schooldays had presented a soporific, anti-intellectual Christianity to him, completely putting him off from day dot (sympathises unlike the Bishop, who admittedly is garishly name-droppy in rushing in to deny that Clifton ever had such dreary chaplains). Muggeridge rather laments for his comic protégé - it is a ‘tragedy’ that Cleese was denied such a treasure. I can well believe he thought it was. Muggeridge was a man captivated - indeed, a man saved - by the Gospel that Cleese had written off as a schoolboy, and which to him meant culture, truth and life, over against the philistinism, lies and death of the USSR where, as a reporter, he had seen the scheme of a dechristianised world played out quite enough, thank you.

The strongest retort the Pythons make, in my opinion, is that the film probes human group dynamics across the board, and this is fair enough. The whole thread about Judean liberation from Roman occupation links to contemporary tribalism and splits in political parties, rather than religion - the People’s Front of Judaea scornfully crying “splitter!” to the Judean People’s Front is lampooning radical politics, not Church Councils. The concerns of Life of Brian cluster generally around the sovereignty of the individual - “sort it out for yourself” is Cleese’s favourite thing to quote from the film during the televised debate. Some have noted the irony that public opposition to Life of Brian, including council-level bans, could indeed resemble herd-following at times - but it would be a mistake to chalk this up to the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ of religious orthodoxy, in the UK at least. The British Board of Film Classification firmly ruled out blasphemy infringement when assessing the content, and in a finely-researched article on the banning of Life of Brian in Britain, Kate Egan notes that attempted censorship was tangled up in a larger skirmish about whether film ratings ought to be nationally or locally controlled.

what is particularly striking about the nature of protests against Life of Brian’s local regulation is the way in which Monty Python, and the kinds of humour they represent, are frequently drawn upon as a resource in order to effectively illustrate the anachronistic, undemocratic or paternalistic nature of local council decisions and the anomalies and inconsistencies that had occurred as a consequence

(‘The Film that’s Banned in Harrogate’: Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Local Censorship, Comedy and Local Resistance’ by Kate Egan, pp. 5-6)

I retain some praise of Life of Brian, I will admit that it advances a clear thesis: human grouping is a social necessity that must never be prized above the quest of the reasonable individual, who, outside of the vulgar mob, should work it all out for themselves. It tries to make that point repeatedly, to varying degrees of success, across a spectrum of human activity. And if I think they miss the mark on the theological stuff, so what? If it gets laughs - and even Muggeridge readily admitted it did, in abundance - then what more can be said? The comedian’s final criterion is the laugh, and on Cleese’s grander and almost Providential conception of laughter as a force “nudging us in the direction of behaving more intelligently” (22nd August 2024, Catholic Herald), then surely the laughs generated by the film indicate its fundamental truthfulness.

This would be the unanswerable apology for Life of Brian - if it’s funny, it’s funny - but it would come at the cost of allowing the skewer to turn back on the film itself. Laughter is, on a certain view, the crystallisation of groupthink. It is the confirmation of mutual agreement, but can also effect it: full houses, with dark conditions to ensure we are as un-self-aware as possible, create the best conditions for comics to do their work, because we want to laugh at what everyone else laughs at. We will laugh at jokes we didn’t even fully understand if everyone else laughs. We will laugh at things that aren’t funny to an outsider, but which express some bond of kinship in the form of an in-joke, or shared memory. It is undeniable that Life of Brian made jokes that met an increasingly post-Christian Western audience right where they wanted - but what a dilemma for Cleese that the laughter of the free-thinking sceptic and the bien pensant sound exactly the same! A Christian critic should never deny that Life of Brian scores big in the laughs department - they, after all, ought to be deeply aware that it is possible to laugh at Christ as he walks his way to the cross.

Indeed, this is the hubris of Monty Python’s film to me now: it presumes it is the only joker in town. Christianity is a solemn and pompous headmaster who requires a good razzing, these public schoolboys think. A case in point is Cleese who, like a sharp comic, is always chomping in the debate to undercut Muggeridge when the latter starts to gush about things like Chartres Cathedral: “not intended to be a funny building,” Cleese quips sardonically, to a big laugh. And fair enough - Muggeridge was playing rhetorician, and left himself open to it. But a little protest escapes the old man’s mouth in reply to Cleese’s sarcasm: don’t forget the gargoyles. It isn’t developed in the debate, but it is a topic he waxes on in his spiritual autobiography, Conversion (1988):

The true function of humour is to express in terms of the grotesque the immense disparity between human aspiration and human performance. Mysticism expresses the same disparity in terms of the sublime. Hence the close connection between the clowns and the mystics; hence, too, the juxtaposition on the great medieval cathedrals of steeples reaching up into the Cloud of Unknowing, and gargoyles grinning malevolently down at our dear earth and all its foolishness. Laughter and mystical ecstasy, that is to say, both derive from an awareness, in the one case hilarious, in the other ecstatic, of how wide is the chasm between Time and Eternity, between us and our Creator (p. 70)

It actually isn’t that making gags around the cross of Calvary is blasphemous - you will find those in medieval mystery plays, and plenty of other jokes flirting with bad taste in what is otherwise perfectly orthodox Christian art. But it is combined there with the mystical insight that Muggeridge identifies here too: that in the infinite gap between God and fallen humanity is an awful lot of grace. It’s a punchline that asks a lot of the audience. How funny that I now see Muggeridge as the one who was trying to get those stuffy old Pythons to lighten up. The whole of creation is a comedy, rightly seen, the old man tries to tell those whippersnappers. Call it a sense of humour failure - they don’t seem to get the joke.