October 5, 1969

There are plenty of reasons to believe that we are at the end of something. I have watched plenty of the rapture videos out there, both before and after, trying to find some practical reason as to why the chosen ones were not chosen, and they can no longer work or even commute after losing their jobs and cars. There is the growing sense that the world is losing its collective sanity - for what it was worth - with wars, protests, authoritarian governments that seem to ignore what the people want (especially if they put them in power). Things are crumbling. As the poet said, The centre cannot hold. We are doomed!

Sorry, I was taking life too seriously for a moment.

Allow me to introduce you to my particular belief system:

Monty Python's Flying Circus.

I first watched the Super Six (hey, can't use Fab Four or Furious Five here) back in the 1980s. I was a little kid, and I grew up in the era of Ronald Reagan, Star Wars (not the good kind; the kind where the American government wanted to shoot down potential nuclear missles raining down on us with lasers), apartheid (officially supported by the US government), hijackings (more of them then than now), the drug war, the first true spike in homelessness, The Day After and Threads (two films about potential nuclear war that you can now watch online - please look at the latter only if you have a strong stomach), the potential for World War Three, far too much spandex, shoulder pads and hairspray on TV, and my own anxiety about the future...

Sound familiar?

Listen, I am not trying to be glib or flippant about the world we live in today, but I am here to remind you that this is nothing new. We have always been bathed in a certain atmosphere of uncertainty, and we have made it through.

And how did I get through it?

With the help of the happy sextet of lunatics who first came to my attention when I stayed up late one Friday night and saw, And Now For Something Completely Different. For those of you not in the know (what does that even mean?), it was the first MP film with sketches from the television show tied together with animation. I was about eleven years old and had grown up with SCTV, Carol Burnett and Three's Company. That was what I was exposed to as comedy. And then I saw a sketch where a couple go to a marriage guidance counsellor and the husband ends up both losing his wife and being crushed by a 16-ton weight. I saw a man trying to communicate using the worst Hungarian phrasebook of all time. I watched a man play Three Blind Mice on the backs of several tortured mice. And then it ended with a competition for The Upper Class Twit of the Year.

I had found my people.

It would be years before I actually watched the show, but the films always seemed to be easy to access. You wanted to take the Arthurian legend apart with minstrels, a cartoon deity, horny vixens in a badly named castle, and a ridiculous villain in the form of a carniverous rabbit? Done. You wanted to know what life was like for someone who had to live in the shadow of his more famous neighbour while trying to fall in love, gain some sense of self and be left alone after being mistaken for the Messiah? No problem. They even answered the question as to what life was all about...

How could I possible think that my problems mattered?

How could I take this world of ours seriously?

And seriously, go out and watch the films and programs again and again and realize that the best compliment the group received, according to John Cleese, was that it was impossible to take the news seriously after watching Monty Python's Flying Circus.

I don't have to take you through this again now, do I?

Just laugh and realize that 56 years ago, we all received a sign that we are all here for a ridiculously short period of time, and we should realize how ridiculous that is.

It's...

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You can find more poems, stories, and articles by Kendall Defoe on my Vocal profile. I complain, argue, provoke and create...just like everybody else.

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