Dissecting the Frog: Dennis the Peasant's "Strange women..." speech

[davidgoldfarb]

Like many geeks, I have as one of my favorite movies Monty Python and the Holy Grail. If you've seen it, you remember Dennis the Peasant holding forth about class struggle. (If you don't, watch it on YouTube here.) I recently wrote an essay trying to analyze as much as I could about what's going on in his speech, in accordance with my theory of

Comments

[kate_schaefer]

I like your analysis, but disagree with your critique of the last sentence, which I find wildly funny. I think the emperor/moistened bint sentence is stretching the metaphor to its greatest length, like taffy, with the simultaneous elevation of king to emperor and lowering of strange women to moistened bint (it is typical of humor in general that any mention of a woman requires that she be lowered, but that's so mandatory as to be hardly worth mentioning). "Scimitar" is a much funnier word than practically any other word for an edged weapon, and ethnically inappropriate, too. Since most of the Pythons were Brits, "scimitar" probably didn't suggest Shriners to them, but it always suggests Shriners to me, which makes me snort in extra derision.

[4thofeleven]

No, I disagree - 'scimitar' is a slight belittlement of 'sword'. 'Sword' has metaphorical/proverbial weight - it's the weapon one beats into plowshares, one who lives by the sword dies by the sword, etc. It's the iconic weapon of medieval nobility, associated with kings and emperors.

In contrast, 'scimitar' has little cultural weight, and the odd specificity does serve to make the peasant's scenario seem even more absurd.