1. Monty Python’s Flying Circus

3. Python forerunners The Goon Show

4. The Goon Show SERIES 4 2 10/9/53 THE MAN WHO TRIED TO DESTROY LONDON'S MONUMENTS 3 10/16/53 THE GHASTLY EXPERIMENTS OF HANS EIDELBURGER 13 12/26/53 THE GIANT BOMBARDON 15 1/8/54 THE MISSING PRIME MINISTER 18 1/29/54 THE HISTORY OF COMMUNICATION 23 3/1/54 THE GREATEST MOUNTAIN IN THE WORLD 24 3/8/54 THE COLLAPSE OF THE BRITISH RAILWAY SANDWICH SYSTEM 25 3/15/54 THE SILENT BUGLAR 29 4/12/54 THE BANK OF ENGLAND ROBBERY

5. Python forerunners

6. Monty Python ”The Piranha Brothers” from Face the Press, Second Series 15 – 9- 1970.

7. Monty Python The Kray Twins: On Tuesday October 24th 1933, at 8 a.m., Violet Kray gave birth to twins -- boys who would be christened Ronnie and Reggie. Reggie came into the world first -- ten minutes ahead of Ronnie. They would grow up to become, arguably, Britain's most famous and infamous gangsters. Their rise to prominence was inextricably linked to their birthplace and its legends and folklore.

8. Kray Twins Their career was marked by the sheer improbability of their success and the ease with which they achieved it. Old style cockney villains, they came close to building a criminal empire, with an effortlessness that illustrated just how out of touch the forces of law and order were in this period, and how little the British establishment comprehended the true meaning of organized crime.

9. The Kray Twins They were only ever convicted of two murders (one each) and both of their victims were miserable, low-life street thugs, with little to redeem them and as about as sympathetic a duo as Goebbles and Himmler. They were never charged or convicted of drug dealing, union manipulation and corruption or terrorism of the order demonstrated by their Italian or American counterparts. And yet, when finally cornered, tried and convicted, they received the heaviest prison sentence ever handed down by a British court of law. Reggie still languishes in prison, thirty-one years after being sentenced. Ronnie died there, of a heart attack. Many people believe that the real victim in the case of Regina v Kray was the law itself. From THE KRAY TWINS: BROTHERS IN ARMS by Thomas L. Jones.

10. TV Comedy Genres: Situation comedies Stand-up comedy Sketch comedy

11. Situation comedies Comedy dramas Comedy of manners Charactets in funny situations Highly structured The Lucy Show TV Comedy Genres:

12. Stand-up comedy A solo comic Style of delivery From mid1980s: political, material on sexuality Ben Elton, Frank Skinner TV Comedy Genres:

13. Sketch comedy A series of separate itemns No real linking theme Topicality Ongoing human foibles Monty Python’s Flying Circus TV Comedy Genres:

14. Features of comedy: Stereotypes Startling event or announcement Snowballing action Incongruity Exaggeration Animation Surprise Malapropism Puns Double entendres

15. Post-Python: the films Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) Monty Python's the Meaning of Life (1983)

16. Post-Python: the other series Ripping Yarns (1977-1979) Fawlty Towers (1975-1979)

17. Proto-postmodernism Metafiction as comedy Parody as genre parody – intertextuality Genre hybridity and fragmentation of narrative Satire – attack on established values The institution of television revealed

18. Proto-postmodernism Metafiction as comedy A combination of discourses. The author persona's discourse is the text itself, e.g.: its production its mimesis research selection approach rhetorics thematics reception Interpretation

19. Proto-postmodernism Metafiction as comedy Metafiction internalises three aspects: The relationship between author and reader The relationship between fiction and criticism The relationship between art and reality A borderline discourse that takes the field between several discourses as its subject.

20. Proto-postmodernism Satire – attack on established values Jean-François Lyotard: Death of the grand narratives: La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, 1979 Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, 1982

21. Literature Mark Currie, ed., Metafiction, Longman, London 1995 Wenche Ommundsen, Metafictions?, Melbourne University Press, 1993 Stuart Sim, ed., The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought, Icon Books, Cambridge 1998 Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon, ed., A Postmodern Reader, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1993 Anthony Davis, Laughtermakers – The Story of TV Comedy, Boxtree, London 1989 Robert Hewison, Monty Python The Case Against, Eyre Methuen, London1981 Gary Hardcastle, Monty Python and Philosophy, Open Court Publishing Co, 2006) Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1976 (1905) Jørgen Riber Christensen, Psycho - Analysis and Texts, Gyldendal, Kbh. 1987