4 | Ralph Pordzik
September 24, 2008 at 6:05 am

No, it is not just “simply funny” or a “Brit thing.” It is much more than that – it is a satiric view of the empire’s last bastion staunchly defended by the representatives of a social class widely associated with the nation’s rise to imperial grandeur and its ensuing fall to political insignificance. To chip away at the apparatus of British imperial identities and thus expose the work of the unconscious in the public’s mind appears to be the major target of this, one of Monty Python’s most suggestive political sketches of the 1970s. (The record of imaginary colonies in the caption provides the viewer with a design pattern or imaginary antecedent history organizing the deconstructive layout of the sketch.)

The conversation the three characters entertain carefully fleshes out the interrelation of the respective words with regard to a specific topic engaged in the sketch, albeit in a comically disguised or displaced form: the decline of the British Empire in the wake of the Second World War. Their primary object of reference – the empire – gone, the four characters’ chit-chat habitually hinges around issues and ideas metaphorically or metonymically tied to this desired object of loss.

The contrast between “tin” and “wood” is of specific interest in this respect as the terms seem to represent, if only in a very vague and allusive fashion, the opposition of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’, ‘fashionable or ‘fugitive’ and ‘established’; in the self-sufficient imaginative world of the sketch, words cate¬gorized as ‘woody’ are supposed to give confidence and certitude, whereas terms identified as ‘tinny’ appear to indicate technical progress and development and therefore the shameful transformation Great Britain as a nation was forced to undergo. Good, solid ‘wooden’ croquet hoops are thus pre¬ferable to hoops made of fashionable tin, just as “sausage” is far more desirable than the “newspapers” that may only bear further bad tidings about Britain’s latest defeat in the world, or the “litterbin” into which former strength and authority seem to have been disposed of. “Seemly” as a reference to ways of social performance “conforming to propriety or good taste” (OED) or “leap” as a term signalling the threat of rapid or unprecedented growth further show the English tendency towards nostalgia and backwardness the sketch seeks to disclose. In all cases, the respective words are either related negatively to the loss they more or less directly signify or, more affirmatively, to an object of desire still somehow nameable and therefore subliminally present in the minds of the characters. Language alone, its patterns and vocal sounds, seems to provide the sense of safety and belonging now, affording the characters new ways to symbolize and thus, through a chain of signifiers, to make an absence present to themselves.