"What is your quest?"

Monty Python

First, watch this 18-minute YouTube clip on “How Monty Python Shaped Modern Comedy”

Welcome to our spring of Monty Python:

With their show "Monty Python's Flying Circus,” these Oxford and Cambridge graduates exposed the absurdity of the institutions and systems around them. They were a troupe of satirists and surrealists that promoted liberation through a strategically crafted chaos, using language and laughter to reveal irrationality at its core. These 6 twenty-somethings generated an artistic revolt against political, social and spiritual conventions, all while promoting the clear-eyed honesty that comes with authentic existence.

Their approach wasn't merely for shock value or entertainment either, but represented a deeply philosophical engagement with questions of meaning, authority, identity, and freedom — using comedy as their chosen medium for this existential exploration.

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?"

Franz Kafka
"Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy."

Franz Kafka
"The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."

Albert Camus
"In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer."

Albert Camus
"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."

Friedrich Nietzsche
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."

Friedrich Nietzsche
"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."

Jean-Paul Sartre
"Life begins on the other side of despair."

Jean-Paul Sartre

Monty Python

First, watch this 18-minute YouTube clip on “How Monty Python Shaped Modern Comedy”

Welcome to our spring of Monty Python:

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?"

"Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy."

"The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."

"In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer."

"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."

"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."

"Life begins on the other side of despair."

Here’s what to watch:

The IDEAS Institute