Monty Python fights back against PC culture, calls BBC’s diversity push “social engineering”

Monty Python fights back against PC culture, calls BBC’s diversity push “social engineering”

If modern BBC suits had a time machine, we’d never see silly walks, dead parrots or limbless knights.

An executive for the British Broadcasting Company recently said the new comedy mission had little room for “six Oxbridge white blokes.”

The company’s passion for diversity means it will tell stories “that haven’t been told and the voices we haven’t yet heard,” according to Shane Allen, the company’s comedy controller.

That’s not all, though. Allen went on to blast the iconic troupe Monty Python as being a comedy relic.

“If you’re going to assemble a team now, it’s not going to be six Oxbridge white blokes. It’s going to be a diverse range of people who reflect the modern world,” he added.

Two of the original Monty Python players begged to differ. Terry Gilliam, the group’s sole American and a highly regarded director in his post-Python life, offered a decidedly un-PC response.

“It made me cry: the idea that … no longer six white Oxbridge men can make a comedy show. Now we need one of this, one of that, everybody represented… this is bull-bleep. I no longer want to be a white male, I don’t want to be blamed for everything wrong in the world: I tell the world now I’m a black lesbian… My name is Loretta and I’m a BLT, a black lesbian in transition….”

“Comedy is not assembled, it’s not like putting together a boy band where you put together one of this, one of that everyone is represented.”

Fellow Python alum John Cleese joined the debate via Twitter.

No. A nasty slur on the handicapped !

Get your priorities right… https://t.co/vW8Q9gwUj3

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) June 20, 2018

From The Telegraph:

BBC’s Head of Comedy puts Monty Python’s lack of originality down to a surfeit of education and racist bias. Unfair! We were remarkably diverse FOR OUR TIME. We had three grammar-school boys, one a poof, and [Terry] Gilliam, though not actually black, was a Yank. And NO slave-owners.

Cleese went further, dubbing the diversity push as “social engineering.”

This isn’t a new fight for the “Fish Called Wanda” star. Cleese’s attacks on the stifling P.C. culture began several years ago. While modern comics like Amy Schumer and Seth Meyers strain to play by the P.C. rules, Cleese isn’t ready to surrender.

“The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is one I absolutely do not subscribe to,” he said in a 2016 video addressing PC sensibilities.

A year later, Cleese told Vulture.com that P.C. thinking “starts as a good idea and then gets taken ad absurdum. And one of the reasons it gets taken ad absurdum is that a lot of the politically correct people have no sense of humor.”

Cleese remains firmly on the left, using much of his time to smite President Donald Trump. But he fully realizes how political correctness stifles humor and the creative process.

Monty Python thrived throughout the 1970s, from the group’s iconic TV show to movies like “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975) and “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (1978). Ironically, another comedy institution born in that era, “Saturday Night Live,” rarely addresses P.C. concerns like its British counterparts.

Those Not Ready for Prime Time Players blazed new trails for humor during the Carter era. Their modern counterparts could learn a thing or two from the surviving Python players.

Christian Toto is editor of the conservative entertainment site HollywoodInToto.com.

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