The Life of Brian
In 1974, the Monty Python team were promoting their second movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. At one point on the tour, someone asked them what their next movie would be.
At the time, the movie Patton, starring George C. Scott, was fairly fresh in people’s memory. It had had an alternate title in some parts of the world, which was Patton: Lust for Glory.
Eric Idle, on hearing the question about what the Python’s next movie would be, joked that it would be called Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory.
This off-the-cuff press conference joke amused the rest of the Pythons so much that, when they next convened to talk about ideas for their third movie, they really wanted it to be about Jesus.
However, being the responsible college-educated chaps that they were, they decided that they would go off and read the New Testament, and other materials about early Christianity, and really do some proper research, so that it wouldn’t just be cheap gags.
The Pythons in Barbados in 1977 or so, working super-hard under, as you can see, exceptionally punishing conditions, on the script for their third movie.
Having done this, when they got back together, they found themselves agreeing that Jesus came across in the sources as a very decent bloke, with some sound ideas about how people ought to treat each other, and not someone that they wanted to take the piss out of. So, for example, their original idea that the movie would be about an errant thirteenth apostle, who was always turning up late, or whatever, seemed a bit lame.
But they also came to realise that there was enormous potential for comedy in telling a story about someone who lived in a time when people were desperately seeking a messiah, and mistook some completely ordinary person for the son of god.
So they ended up making a film, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which does not mock Jesus at all, but which mocks the fallibility and wishful thinking of people who are desperate to have infallible messiahs.
Jesus appears in the opening scene, giving the Sermon on the Mount, but the camera pulls away from him to the very edge of the crowd, where people can’t clearly hear what he’s saying, and make up various bizarre theories about it. And then get into arguments about what exactly he may or may not have said.
Kenneth Colley as Jesus, in the opening moments of Life of Brian.
The result is a film which, as various Pythons have noted, is not blasphemous, in that it never mocks Jesus, but is heretical, because it does mock organised religion.
So, if the Pythons are right, the best message is to look at what he actually said, and not at other people’s interpretations of what he said, and figure out if you think he was saying something worth saying.
HE'S A VERY NAUGHTY BOY - CLICK HERE
WHAT HAVE THE ROMANS EVER DONE FOR US - CLICK HERE
ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE - CLICK HERE
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