Monty Python and Philosophy by Gary L. Hardcastle

All these visual storytelling induce in the viewer percepts like of spaces, environments, emotions, thoughts, feelings, expectations, dreams, ideals, passions, fears, exaltations, events - a jigsaw that creates a flow of information, emotion and a story point of view. These Cinematic Storytelling Communication Projects are based on devices of scripting, production and lighting design, directing, iconic and subliminal meanings approach, photography and painting compositions or their language of representation, perceptual and cognitive issues, editing, ensemble together in a cinematic narrative Syntax, be a live action film - fiction or documentary, or an 2D or 3D animation - drawn or digital.

The cinematic storytelling can be so immersive in its simulation of environments, characters and situations told to the viewer, that he forgets his “reality” to live in the fictional one, as if were his own. Since that during this time the viewer excludes its own reality, he forgets it because every one of us, at any time, can only exist in single reality, at each given time. This immersive experience of a fictional narrative in the first person is planned and intentional, in significant and communicational terms. Being fictional narratives, these are, nevertheless, experienced as if they were realities. In an audiovisual kinematic narrative there is always a viewer's constraint as he experiences emotions, thoughts and even realities that are not of his daily life. (In volume 3 of the Philosophy of Humor Yearbook, edited by Lydia Amir, published by De Gruyter, Berlin, November 2022) Following the implicit reference to rhetoric built in the very names of some of these items, this article shows how the well-established tropes of classical rhetoric, indeed three hundred of them, can be employed, with a modicum of analogical creativity, in order to address the visual component of comedic sketches, as exemplified by Monty Python’s famous Flying Circus. In his 1990s studies of visual humor, Noël Carroll left to “future researchers” the laborious task of developing a “comprehensive and rigorous classification of the phenomena” pertaining to “the sight gag.” Carroll contributed five possible items belonging to such a taxonomy, i.e., “the mutual interference gag” (e.g., a character’s perspective vs the viewer’s one), “mimed metaphors” (e.g., Chaplin’s bread rolls as dancing feet), “the object analog” (e.g., a tuba used as an umbrella), “the switch image” (i.e., reinterpretations forced by montage) and “the solution gag” (e.g., the character’s inventiveness surprises the viewer).

Monty Python and Philosophy by Gary L. Hardcastle