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. We are all Britons, and I am your king. Woman: I didn’t know we had a king. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (White et al., 1975 : Scene 3) This clip from the British comedy group Monty Python illustratively denaturalises sovereign rule in the above encounter
about British political and labour history,6 we hope this volume demonstrates that we cannot ignore the far left; and while some might disregard such groups, parties and tendencies as obscure or on the fringes of the discipline, we argue that their histories reveal wider insights into the functions of the Labour Party, the role that social movements have played in recent history, 10 Waiting for the revolution and the potential impact of far-left ideas beyond the small groups parodied repeatedly in mediocre Monty Python-esque routines over the last thirty
loans (though he does eventually direct Yunus to the higher-ups); like a Monty Python sketch he is having fun with Professor Yunus, who is made a fool of even as he has played the fool in order to expose and challenge the unfairness of the system. The power of the fool is not so much to reveal or elicit particular information: that is the role of the sleuth or the investigator. It is rather to reveal
from Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), that ironically asks, ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ with the conclusion being that they significantly developed society. Similarly, in the Enough Food IF video, British characters are on their way to an anti-aid rally, determined to campaign against aid even after their discussion on the bus about the many ‘successes’ of international aid. The
(London: Atlantic Books, 2009). 21 In 1979 the Monty Python film Life of Brian was treated as blasphemous by various religious groups and local authorities in the UK and the US. It was condemned as such by Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark, in a BBC televised debate. 22 See Paul Berman's compelling reflections on this
intonation right, and thereby ensure that she heavily emphasised the ‘You’ at the start of the sentence; if it was all read in the same intonation, the aural impact would have been lost (Mount, 2009: 330). On another occasion, after the newly formed Liberal Democrats had adopted a soaring bird as their logo, it was suggested that Thatcher mock this in her Conservative conference speech by citing Monty Python’s famous ‘dead parrot’ sketch; ‘This parrot has ceased to be. It has shuffled off its mortal coil … This is an ex-parrot’. Not being familiar with the surreal comedy
rhetorical techniques evident in the speeches of other politicians, Johnson’s injection of humour creates a distinctive, audibly appealing effect which attracts attention and provokes a response precisely because it defies convention. These devices are used to particular effect when advancing a partisan perspective as evident in his assertion that ‘there has been something bizarre about the lip-smacking savagery of the Lib Dems, with Vince Cable morphing into a mad axeman, a transformation as incongruous as the killer rabbit in Monty Python’ ( Johnson, 2009). This metaphor