Margaret Thatcher Does the Dead Parrot Sketch
Margaret Thatcher does the Dead Parrot Sketch
Among the many remembrances of Margaret Thatcher, who passed this morning aged 87, Matt Duss reminds us of this:
Among the many remembrances of Margaret Thatcher, who passed this morning aged 87, Matt Duss reminds us of this:
The most hilarious thing about that is that it is a skit performed with the rhythm of a SOTU.
The Pythons did not appreciate it.
I hate to disagree with Cleese about comedy, but I think that her lack of humor is part of what makes it funny here. Her straight face is honest.
Cleese seems to have come around the Thatcher’s thinking however. He laments the loss of world he made is living denigrating, but he’s now rich enough to avoid all the unpleasantness his kind wrought.
Heh, so Cleese got old and started telling kids to get off his lawn? Shocking. That’s so unusual.
It’s hard to find the right words for a moment like this, but luckily Elvis Costello has already done so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy3-R97wDKs
First the joy:
And then the revulsion at one’s own joy:
I haven’t quite gotten to the revulsion yet.
Is Cleese doing the Basil Fawlty routine nowadays?
@Rob in CT: “Heh, so Cleese got old and started telling kids to get off his lawn? Shocking. That’s so unusual.”
It is useful, however, to remember that sometimes those kids really should get off your lawn. That people have been wrongly complaining about society going to hell since forever should not obscure the fact that society has actually gone to hell on more than one occasion.
Mike
Well, the fact that you can’t get any decent fish n chips in Central London is a bloody disgrace 🙂
That was a pretty amazing partnership we had back in the 1980’s, with Thatcher and Reagan.
Alas, while conservatives were busy bringing economies back from the brinks of FUBAR and to boot destroying without firing a shot what then was a worldwide virus of expansionist communism, the far left on both sides of the pond were busy obtaining teaching credentials, getting journalism degrees (back when newspapers and such still had audiences), infiltrating the bureaucratic apparatuses of local, state and federal politics, and obtaining tenure or getting on the tenure track at colleges and universities. The results are about as stark as inevitable.
Britain is in such ghastly decline they can’t go even two years without posting at least one negative quarter of real GDP. The US of course is in such catastrophic decline for various key metrics (debt-GDP; deficit-GDP) we’ve already become a third-world banana republic.
Thatcher once said that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. She wasn’t just whistling dixie. History has proven that to be true, time and again. From Weimar, to South America, to Central America, and now to Europe and especially to PIIGS. And the US is next on the shit list.
Thatcher and John Major didn’t get enough collective years in office to overcome the undertow of the lowest common denominators. Reagan would have needed to clone himself younger and then to serve four terms — with dead solid lock majorities in Congress — to overcome the rank disasters of the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Now the prospects are as bleak as they’ve ever been. And getting worse almost literally by the day. A sad set of denouements for two of history’s greatest historical powers.
Yes Tsar. It was almost on par with Bush and Blair.
Well, except for the fact that Bush/Blair didn’t break their own and international laws quite as brazenly.
But I’m guessing you were no where near the Persian Gulf in 1984.
@Tsar Nicholas: You really are a squawking idiot. I’m actually amazed you can breathe in and out without coaching.