I'd say there was a bit of kicking down. The gumbies and the three Yorkshireman a bit (that predates python, they brought it in with them, they'd written for something like "that was the week that was") mainly they kicked middle class values.
In that vein, TBH I find it hard to square a post celebrating famous British humour on a site where any humour, whether good or in poor taste, is mercilessly punished by downvoting and faux outrage. I'm not calling hypocrisy, just pointing to an odd juxtaposition of values.
Do y'all delight in things the Python team said precicely because you wouldn't tolerate it or have the personal sense of security to say it today?
I don't think HN actually hates humour, it just has a relatively high bar. Some of my most upvoted comments have been jokes. But I like to think they were reasonably good ones.
Regarding the Pythons and transgression, I think for me it's probably a case by case thing. There's obviously "good" transgression and "bad" transgression, but I suppose you have to have some support for the willingness to transgress, if you want positive social change to be a possibility.
Regarding specific things the Pythons said, the most actually transgressive-at-the-time thing I can think of is probably Graham Chapman's overt homosexuality and support for gay rights, which was no small thing in 1970s Britain.
Edit: Or you could make a case for it being the "blasphemous" Life of Brian, although I don't think the public outrage about that was really in step with mainstream opinion.
Edit2: I'm wondering whether Some Like it Hot, Milton Berle etc were considered transgressive in the US? Were these things not actually quite mainstream in the 20th century, even in the US?
Yes, I think us Brits defused many of our internal tensions as a mult-cultural AND classist society in the 70s and 80s with the transition from vaudeville racism to new-wave "alternative comedy". It didn't change the status-quo but it did move the dial toward more progressive ideas.
I do think HN is an odd place in it's intolerance of humour, and I don't see that "high bar" because TBH it's the lowborw geeky "knob-gags" that make the grade here in my observation. I think it's actually the old struggle of poets and philosophers (see Republic 2, 3, 5 [0]) is at play. HN adapts to filtering what it can't process. It's a bit like that AI brain in Blake's Seven that Villa causes to explode by feeding it riddles. I'm noticing even this "meta" talk about humour is being downvoted (and I hope those doing so are getting a good ironic laugh from that) :)
I've always seen this as a counterculture to Reddit, not as intolerance of humour.
I've made my share of (attempted) humourous posts on HN.
The main pushback I've gotten has been from people who want to keep the conversations focused on "serious" discussion.
Casual racism has and always will be there. No point in worrying about it.
Intentional joking, with the understanding that it should be taken as a joke. Often about the reaction of the triggerable. "Dear BBC..."
I’ve heard that before and I don’t get it. They were just playing characters like any other they played, but some were women so they wore woman’s clothing.
It has nothing to do with feminism (for me, at least), it's just that I didn't find it funny.
When femininity was an important part of the sketch, they often had Carol Cleveland or other women play the role.
If you don't find it funny that's fine.
That amounts to objecting to representing females. Rule was: "female unless awkward → one of the pythons; when awkward → Carol Cleveland".
The point was that the writers would also be the performers.
As it was, I think Connie Booth was the only proper lady that showed up in Python stuff.
Little Britain's poor taste jokes would've happened regardless of Python, because of its centuries long history of crossdressing.
Many of their takes also involved kicking back against society. Put a man in a woman's position and suddenly the things women endured daily become absurd. Have a man make a crass suggestion towards another man like an asshole would to a woman, and suddenly it becomes absurd and weird. In isolation those events could be considered homophobic, but between an animated politician eating the queen and a farmer explaining that his sheep are flying into trees to nest, I don't think such pessimism is warranted.
My take watching Python is that the actors very much knew that misogyny and homophobia are stupid as a concept. They didn't shy away from portraying society as it was (and unfortunately, still is), but they weren't necessarily trying to take anyone down.
The fact many Python sketches are offensive these days says more about how society has aged than Python, in my opinion. When Python has a man in a dress, it's just a silly character, but when in modern media it has become necessary for such things to be a statement for (or, even worse, against) basic human rights.
I think the strength and weakness in Python is that they'd make fun of anything and anyone. That include sensitive topics that haven't changed as much as they should have in the last century.
As a Frenchman I should be defending Tati but by God I have never found him funny. Poetic, maybe (maybe!) but funny?? Not in the least IMHO. One can guess what he means, immediately, there is no subtext. "Modernity is dehumanizing." Yeah, well, it probably is, but we all know that now, don't we? (Same thing with Chaplin BTW.)
Monty Python is incredibly funny, and still is, because it's often absurd, and absurd stays absurd forever.
They could be bizarrely homophobic and also celebrate gay culture in the same show. They were often very misogynist.
I still laugh at it. I still watch it. But the adulation faded.
No Australian enjoys their take on Australian wine. It's wincingly unpleasant. Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and Clive James fed cultural stereotypes which died out when earl's court became too expensive for Australian backpackers. The abos armpit thing comes back to me far too often from naive British friends who would never use the N word, or make jokes about Irish being stupid. They don't know what they're saying.
Eric Idle complained he had to do Spamelot to get some retirement income. George Harrison made bank on the films.
The situationist surreal stuff, Terry Gilliams pasteup animation, very good. Dressing up as ladies.. tiresome.
There's a line from pythons dressing up as working class women to little Britain making fun of incontinent old women.