Monty Python Research Articles

AlphaFold and Protein Folding: Not Dead Yet! The Frontier Is Conformational Ensembles.

Like the black knight in the classic Monty Python movie, grand scientific challenges such as protein folding are hard to finish off. Notably, AlphaFold is revolutionizing structural biology by bringing highly accurate structure prediction to the masses and opening up innumerable new avenues of research. Despite this enormous success, calling structure prediction, much less protein folding and related problems, "solved" is dangerous, as doing so could stymie further progress. Imagine what the world would be like if we had declared flight solved after the first commercial airlines opened and stopped investing in further research and development. Likewise, there are still important limitations to structure prediction that we would benefit from addressing. Moreover, we are limited in our understanding of the enormous diversity of different structures a single protein can adopt (called a conformational ensemble) and the dynamics by which a protein explores this space. What is clear is that conformational ensembles are critical to protein function, and understanding this aspect of protein dynamics will advance our ability to design new proteins and drugs.

History and Humor

Arguably, Monty Python’s The Life of Brian is one of the most controversial interpretations of Christ’s story, due to the Pythons’ shrewd, satirical sense of humor and the film’s mockery of the historical public’s admiration and obsession with messianic figures. This paper takes a similar stance to scholars who argue, however, that the film is not blasphemous—it does not mock Christ himself. The argument hinges on the distinction between Christ and Brian. In separating Christ and Brian into two figures, the film operates on another level, allowing viewers to experience the rise of a messianic figure through Brian as well as introducing them to the historical context. Therefore, though ostensibly not about Christ, The Life of Brian provides insight into the historical time period of Christ and can be beneficial for those interested in furthering their understanding of Christ’s story.

Killer Decorations

This paper assesses the historical accuracy of Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam's film Monty Python the Holy Grail, which demonstrates how the film's satirical elements are tied to morality and the Gothic tradition. It examines John Ruskin's Victorian criticism and the marginal decorations within Gothic manuscripts and sculpture. By identifying and displaying their symbolic power as symbols of morality, as adapted in the film, this analysis offers a fresh take on why killer rabbits are found within Gothic manuscripts.

Quantifying the benefits of inefficient walking: Monty Python inspired laboratory based experimental study

Quantifying the benefits of inefficient walking: Monty Python inspired laboratory based experimental study

The violence inherent in the system

The concept of ‘the violence inherent in the system’ was famously satirized by Monty Python in their movie The Holy Grail. In order to avoid ridicule, left-wing theorists and activists for a long time stopped using the expression. The underlying social critique, which had given rise to the expression, was also widely dismissed from serious consideration, merely through invocation of the phrase. Because of this, there has been little explicit discussion of the actual political theory that was being satirized in this scene. And yet the theory has continued to exercise considerable influence on the practice of many left-wing groups, particularly in the way that protest is conceptualized and carried out. The central objective in this paper will be to provide an explicit articulation of the theory, in order to show how it falls short of providing a meaningful critique of any aspect of our social practices.

What have the Romans ever done for us?

The only privilege of being the Editor in Chief of a journal is that I get the opportunity to write an editorial for every edition. I can say, within reason, what I like, without peer review, censor or editing by anyone else. This being my last editorial for the journal that is probably even more true. So, as I sat contemplating the blank screen to write this editorial, my tongue decided it was once again time to explore the tooth that was causing me some discomfort, where a chip had come off making it extremely sensitive. My experience of managing this dental problem brought my mind to the RHMT funding for rural health workforce training and that is when the title of this paper came to the front of my mind. Yes, for those of you from my generation, I am referencing the classic scene from Monty Python's, Life of Brian. As John Cleese, playing the part of Reg goes on to say “apart from sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” What has that got to with the Australian rural health care. Well at times I feel like I am Reg in the Life of Brian. I struggle to see what the Romans, in the form of the RHMT funded Rural Clinical Schools, University Departments of Rural Health and Dental Training Expanding Rural Placement Programs have done for us. If I go back to my tooth. I live in a regional city, Bendigo, with both a Rural Clinical School (Monash), a University Department of Rural Health (La Trobe University) and a Dental School, solely based in Bendigo. Yet, when I saw the dentist and it was determined that I need my tooth assessed for suitability of a crown (it might need root canal work), my options were to wait a long time for an appointment with the Endodontist who comes to Bendigo from Melbourne, or travel to Melbourne to see them at their practice. In the latter case, I could get an appointment within a week, in the former, more than a month wait with ongoing pain. So, despite all the RHMT funding and rural health workforce training here in Bendigo, if I wanted a reasonably quick resolution of my tooth pain, I needed to go to Melbourne. Fortunately, I have the advantage of a good income and flexible employment, which allowed me to do that, with no financial penalty. Unfortunately, the vast majority of our rural communities do not have that privilege. So, at an individual level, I feel like Reg. Apart from “on average, graduates who had the most rural clinical placement experience are now working more in regional, rural and remote Australia” (1 p213) and “the RHMT program, has a direct economic benefit to the communities and regions with economic analyses demonstrating a positive multiplier effect of around 2 i.e. for every spent under the RHMT program another dollar is generated in the local economy” (1 p 236), I wonder what has the RHMT programme done for us. Despite these assertions, we do not have any good quality evidence anywhere that the approach we are taking is actually addressing the problems of recruiting and retaining a rural and remote health workforce. Where are the data that the workforce shortage in a city or town is less after an RCS or UDRH was established than before, or that towns without RCS's and UDRHs have more workforce shortages and worse health outcomes than communities with them. In the most recent review, that I am aware of,2 identified that 34 papers focused on health workforce retention interventions for rural and remote areas. They conclude that most of the studies were of low quality, that about only one-third applied appropriate statistical analysis to the date, less than half adjusted for key potential confounders, and many had no comparator groups.2 In no other contexts of health care would that be considered a solid literature base to make any conclusions on, yet it does not deter the authors from asserting “Policy makers seeking rural retention in the medium and longer term would be prudent to strengthen rural training pathways and limit the use of strongly coercive interventions.”2 So, my plea to the few people who read these editorials is can we please stop pretending that the RHMT programme has had a major impact on the health and health workforce of rural and remote Australia and spent the time and intellectual effort to actually determine if this approach is working because I am not seeing what the RHMT programme has done for my tooth.

Quantifying the benefits of inefficient walking: Monty Python inspired laboratory based experimental study

ObjectiveTo compare the rate of energy expenditure of low efficiency walking with high efficiency walking.DesignLaboratory based experimental study.SettingUnited States.Participants13 healthy adults (six women, seven men) with no known gait disorder,...

Measuring human energy expenditure: public health application to counter inactivity

This article discusses the use of indirect calorimetry for the measurement of human energy expenditure. Quantification of energy expenditure during low efficiency walking (as depicted in the Monty Python sketch...

Mary Magdalene and the Life of Judith in Life of Brian

Abstract This article provides a snapshot of how Mary Magdalene was understood in 1970s Britain through the character of Judith in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Judith as presented in Life of Brian is compared with Mary Magdalene as presented in Jesus Christ Superstar, especially the receptions of the hit musical in newspapers of the time where there was a recurring focus on sexuality and gender stereotypes. The comparison shows that, while Life of Brian may not be the most progressive film in terms of gender and sexuality, it did challenge some of these stereotypes about Mary Magdalene by normalizing Judith’s attitude towards sex and making her (largely) a voice of reason in the film.

Cathedral of Power: Battersea Power Station in Dystopian Visual Culture

Cathedral of Power: Battersea Power Station in Dystopian Visual Culture

:Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

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The Visual Rhetoric of Monty Python’s Flying Circus: Fulfilling Noël Carroll’s Hopes for a Classification of Sight Gags

Abstract In his 1990s studies of visual humor, Noël Carroll left to “future researchers” the laborious task of developing a “comprehensive and rigorous classification of the phenomena” pertaining to “the sight gag.” Carroll contributed five possible items belonging to such a taxonomy, i. e., “the mutual interference gag” (e. g., a character’s perspective vs the viewer’s one), “mimed metaphors” (e. g., Chaplin’s bread rolls as dancing feet), “the object analog” (e. g., a tuba used as an umbrella), “the switch image” (i. e., reinterpretations forced by montage) and “the solution gag” (e. g., the character’s inventiveness surprises the viewer). Following the implicit reference to rhetoric built in the very names of some of these items, this article shows how the well-established tropes of classical rhetoric, indeed three hundred of them, can be employed, with a modicum of analogical creativity, in order to address the visual component of comedic sketches, as exemplified by Monty Python’s famous Flying Circus.

Naomi Noble Richard

Naomi Noble Richard

Funny How? Sketch Comedy and the Art of Humor

Funny How? seeks to demonstrate what makes a great sketch funny. The simplicity of the book’s main goal is its great virtue and informs its best part: its summaries of a dozen and more sketches performed by a wide variety of comedians. Guided by a broad sense of what constitutes sketch comedy, Clayton picked these sketches because he loves them. This makes good sense, since the point of the book is to talk straightforwardly about what makes things funny, and not, for instance, to provide a scholarly history of the genre. This simplicity comes with a price, though, insofar as the book does not enter into a dialogue with contemporary humor scholarship or with current theories. If readers want to hear what the author has to say about specific sketches or be introduced to a method for summarizing sketches, this book may be of interest to them.The book includes a relatively long first chapter that seeks to articulate an approach to humor theory that stresses how humor is “irreducibly compound.” On this approach, humor “will therefore most fruitfully yield to a form of analysis that is receptive to the multiplicity of factors in its construction and sensitive to the ways they meld and combine” (47). The summaries of sketches that follow, then, are demonstrations of this approach. The idea that humor cannot be reduced to one factor and that any approach should account for many factors while avoiding unnecessary universalism is, however, common to most contemporary humor scholarship, and so the book’s demonstration of how reductive approaches are inadequate not unsurprisingly takes the form of simplistic takedowns of famous “postulates” (34) about humor from Hobbes to Kant, Bergson, and Schopenhauer. There are almost no references to any twenty-first century theories, such as Alenka Zupančič’s The Odd One In: On Comedy or John Limon’s Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America, just as there are almost no references to humor scholarship, including scholarship on sketch comedy. The book’s contributions are not to be found in such scholarly conversation.The book’s subsequent chapters provide summaries of sketches generally grouped together by themes, including parodies, what-ifs, music, and rivalry. For the most part, the focus is on UK and US film and television sketches, with one notable exception being the toilet party scene in Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty. The introduction opens with a summary of the famous parrot sketch by Monty Python and the Flying Circus, providing a good example of what follows throughout the book. The work here challenges us, compelling us to think through what makes the sketch funny and to consider how it might have been done differently. This strategy offers a useful way to think about humor and also a useful way to teach (one gets the impression Clayton is a fine teacher of humor). How would the sketch have been different if instead of being about a parrot being returned to a pet store, it had instead been about “a rubber hammer being returned to a hardware store?” (2). Or what if the pet had not been a parrot but another animal, such as a dog? (3) The provisional conclusion as to the sketch-comedy value of the parrot is that parrots “are not so compassionate that the death of an unknown parrot could be felt tragic, but also not so simply decorative as to make it an impersonal matter of return-and-replace” (3). It’s impossible to summarize adequately here the account Clayton provides because its value is in its attention to the details of the scene. If we are going to talk about what makes things funny in sketch comedy then we do need to get down to the details. A later summary of a mock advertisement for the Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! is another fine example of what Clayton’s approach has to offer in its careful attention to detail (113–18).The book concludes with a suggestion that Aristotle’s famous three modes of persuasion—ethos, pathos, and logos—might be instructively applied to theorizing how sketches persuade us to laugh (128). While this is an interesting suggestion, it would have made more sense to have introduced it at the beginning of the book and then to have tried it out during the summaries of sketches that are the substance of the book. This method would have been consistent with the simple approach of the book and perhaps provided a light illustration of how to think through comedy, which is what this book has to offer readers interested in sketch comedy and humor in general.

The United States of Medievalism

The United States of Medievalism

Pragmatism, Peirce, and the Pandemic

Pragmatism, Peirce, and the Pandemic

Britain's Olympic Women: A History

In recent years, scholars have considered many facets of British sports. They have gone beyond the simple narrative of great moments and characters from the worlds of football, cricket, and rugby to consider the ways in which the British military used sports in its training programs. Other studies have introduced readers to the way that noncombatant British men used sport to validate their masculinity during World War II and to examine the role of sport in the expansion of the British Empire and how men from Trinidad and Nigeria used proficiency in sport to assert their refusal to acquiesce to their colonial status. Occasionally, those studies alluded to women's role, but only in rare cases have the experiences of female British athletes been used to elucidate such urgent matters as the Cold War in sports. Happily, those interested in a broader study of British women's sport have a new narrative examining women's sport by studying the biographies of significant equestriennes, swimmers, fencers, and football players and how those women dealt with the obstacles in the way of their success.In Britain's Olympic Women, Jean Williams has accomplished a remarkable feat in delving into publicly accessible information, family archives, oral histories, and even a particular episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus to tell individual women's stories and draw larger lessons from those stories. In doing so, Williams provides insights into the work scholars do to understand their subject. Sometimes the archives do not exist, sometimes they are inaccessible, and sometimes they exist only because families maintained them, but Williams does what she can to tell the reader what she has discovered and to offer suggestions to others wishing to learn more about the sporting experience of British women. For student readers of this book who want to find topics for research, the suggestions are invaluable.As Williams explains, opportunities for female athletes were limited by a variety of factors. For equestriennes, access to good horses and time to train them made their development possible. For swimmers, access to local swimming clubs was invaluable. For working-class women, the occasional support offered by their employers proved to be crucial. But even where women had access to these opportunities, their ability to play was limited both locally and internationally by the men who controlled the Olympics and similar organizations. For the first half of the twentieth century, for example, female athletes were effectively barred from eventing and show jumping because those disciplines were limited to uniformed officers. Likewise, women whose best running events were in the longer distances were essentially barred from the Olympics because of decisions to limit competition between female athletes to shorter distances. In this book, Williams shows the diverse efforts of women to get around those constraints.As she explains, there was an effort by the French feminist Alice Milliat to establish a separate but equal athletic tournament for women during the 1920s. In Britain, other women created the Women's Amateur Athletic Association, which endeavored to ensure female athletes received appropriate coaching and greater opportunities to compete. But it was only after World War II and the Soviet Union entered into world athletics that British women received the chance to show their patriotism (and commitment to their nonathletic housewife lives) on the field. British media endorsed those ideas, making the tale of encounters between British and Soviet women into the broader postwar narrative of plucky little Britain holding its own against the state-supported athletes of the Eastern Bloc. As the century progressed, British universities, most notably Loughborough, continued studies on the effect of sport on women's bodies, which also helped increase sporting opportunities, as it was established, incontrovertibly, that there were no ill health results from intense exercise.By the end of the Second Millennium, the British government stepped up to support athletes by providing money for coaching, travel, and equipment after the poor results achieved at the Olympics of 1992 and 1996. This support grew quickly after London was awarded the 2012 Games, as the men and women of “Team GB” grew into a force to be reckoned with. Meanwhile, professional leagues modeled on men's leagues began to open up more opportunities, especially for female footballers. And, of course, any narrative such as this has to include the role of the British royal family, especially the Princess Royal, who cemented British enthusiasm for equestrian events.This is a fine book that should be of interest to both the general reader and specialist. It is organized by chapters with notes at the end of each and affords anyone interested in a particular time period excellent places to begin following their own threads to learn more.

Tragedy plus Time: National Trauma and Television Comedy

Tragedy plus Time: National Trauma and Television Comedy

Christianity and the Triumph of Humor: From Dante to David Javerbaum by Bernard Schweizer

Reviewed by: Christianity and the Triumph of Humor: From Dante to David Javerbaum by Bernard Schweizer Jahdiel Perez (bio) Christianity and the Triumph of Humor: From Dante to David Javerbaum Bernard Schweizer Routledge, 2020. vii + 254 pp. $160 cloth, $48.95 paperback, $44.05 ebook. Schweizer's Christianity and the Triumph of Humor is a well-written gem of interdisciplinary research. Its synthesis of religious studies, theology, social science, and humor research into a coherent argument is insightful and impressive. [End Page 229] Chapter one questions and refutes the notion that humor is an inherently liberal phenomenon, that "all laughter has an anti-authoritarian function" (14). Schweizer observes how humor has historically thrived under authoritarian conditions. He notes that the Nazi regime encouraged jokes as a way to alleviate grievances against totalitarian policies. Then, Schweizer draws upon the social scientific data of a "humor appreciation survey" he conducted in 2016, which studied how nearly 800 liberals and conservatives responded to twenty-four different jokes. He found that there was no significant influence of political ideology on humor appreciation. In chapter two, statements from the Bible and some Patristic theologians, like Tertullian, Basil, Augustine, and Jerome, among others, seem to denounce laughter and festivities. Since these statements are listed in isolation from relevant context, Schweizer's analysis here is objectionably thin. However, his citation of the 1431 condemnation of the Feast of Fools, the 1534 ban of popular mystery plays by English Protestants, and the prohibition of Easter Laughter throughout the 1670s as examples in which church authorities "sought to curb the people's inclination toward mirth and levity" (51) supports his overall point. A significant shift occurred in the 1970s, when some Christian theologians sought to overturn this "long and regretful history of denunciations of laughter" by affirming the theological significance of levity and comedy (31). These "theologians of laughter" include Conrad Hyers, Richard Cote, Karl-Jusef Kuschel, J. William Whedbee, Gerald Arbuckle, James Martin, Jaqueline Bussie, Charles Campbell, and Johan Cilliers, among others. Schweizer criticizes their approach by denying three propositions that he thinks most of them affirm—namely, that laughter is a gift from God, that Scripture is replete with humor, and that laughter can be neatly divided into positive and negative expressions. Chapter three is a diachronic view of religious comedy from the Middle Ages to the present century. Schweizer selects several works that he thinks represent the high points of religious humor: Dante's Divine Comedy, Boccaccio's The Decameron, Erasmus's In Praise of Folly, Rabelais's Gargantua, Voltaire's Candide, Twain's The Mysterious Stranger, France's The Revolt of Angels, Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk, Morrow's The Godhead Trilogy, Currie Jr.'s God is Dead, and Javerbaum's The Last Testament. The account Schweizer offers here is that of a gradual progression up a hierarchical scale of comic objects. The lower-order targets of the hierarchy range from laypersons to lower clergy like monks and priests to higher-ranking clerics like bishops, cardinals, and the Pope. The higher-order targets range from ecclesiastical institutions to orthodox doctrine to Scripture to the Trinity and religion in general. Where Dante playfully ridiculed individual Christians and lower clergy, Javerbaum irreverently mocks the Bible and the Trinity. [End Page 230] Admittedly, the inclusion of such atheistic or "misotheistic" authors (76) as Voltaire, France, and Javerbaum into a historical survey of specifically religious humor is innovative, some might even say objectionable. However, it is only problematic if one understands the term to mean humor produced by and for religious people. Schweizer defines religious humor as humor about religion (203), which does not refer to the religious sensibilities of its producers or intended audiences. As such, he can group Christian and atheist writers into the same historical account of religious humor. A synchronic view of religious comedy in contemporary Anglo-American popular culture is provided in chapter four. Schweizer begins with Christian stand-up comedians Mark Lowry, Brad Stine, and Anthony Griffith, proceeds to the Life of Brian film by Monty Python, the atheist YouTube channel DarkMatter2525, and ends with comic skits by Rowan Atkinson, Robin Williams, Stephen Colbert, and Steve Carell. The point Schweizer makes...

Book Review

Book Review