John Stuart Mill of his own free will,

On half a keg of shandy was particularly ill,

Plato, they say, could stick it away--

Half a pint of whiskey every day.

Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle

And also fond of his dram;

Rene Descartes was a drunken fart

I'll drink to all of them!

The TV shows are worth watching but of very uneven quality. A very funny bit about "historical impersonations" featuring Graham Hill impersonating St. John the Baptist--the moustachioed, goggle-girded head of the racing car driver speeding across stage on top of a silver platter with Indy 500 noises on the soundtrack--can be followed by dismal material about a football team explaining "Why We Love the Yangtze."

Like most contemporary humorists, Monty Python homes in wherever it spots a cliche so rotten it's ready to split open in an explosion of laughter. They take a line like "I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition" and turn it into a six-minute joke when Cardinal Fang bursts in shouting, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" and proceeds to torture his victims wih a comfy chair and a soft pillow. During the surfeit of Mary Queen of Scots a few years ago, Monty Python produced a skit that reduced the enigmatic Scotswoman's appeal to its formulaic minimum--a long series of sounds as Mary Queen of Scots is battered to death until on gruff soldier's voice murmurs, "Is she dead yet?" and Mary squeaks back, "No, I'm not" not" and the battering begins again.

British class warfare is summarized in a bout between a heavyweight champion and Lord Clark of Civilization for the Slade Professorship of Fine Arts at Oxford (Lord Clark loses in the first round). The defeat of Alistair Cooke, the boring commentator on Masterpice Theatre, is even more ignominious--he is overpowered by a duck while reminiscing of Philadelphia.

The test of humor is its staying power--the Marx brothers are still funny forty years later. You can't apply that criterion to Monty Python yet. But my roommates have been answering my questions about the weird things they say lately with quotes like "Well, that's where my claim falls to the ground" or "It's a pun" and "It's people like you what cause unrest." This could go too far. I don't know how I could take a lunch made out of spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, chicken tetrazzini and spam.