“Loretta” Cancels Monty Python

[Valin]

Power Line

Steven Hayward

May 22 2023

It goes without saying that you could never screen Blazing Saddles on a college campus, because the woke could never pick up the satire on racism at its heart. In fact as Mel Brooks repeatedly says, he couldn’t make the movie today. The wokerati embedded in Hollywood would kill the project.

Ditto for Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which is partly a satire of political extremism. (“What have the Romans ever done for us!?” “Brought peace?” “Shut up!”)

Especially the famous “Loretta” scene, which I have posted before, but will use any excuse to post again:

Well guess what? There is a stage musical version of Life of Brian in development, largely because of the success of “Spamalot,” the stage musical version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And guess which scene the producers have said must be cut out? Of course you don’t need to guess at all:

(Snip)

Cleese told an audience at his one-man show last week that when the scene (co-written with the late Graham Chapman) was performed at a read-through for the new show in New York last year, doubts emerged. ‘At the end, I said to the American actors: ‘What do you think?’ And they said: ‘We love the script, but you can’t do that stuff about Loretta nowadays.’

‘So here you have something there’s never been a complaint about in 40 years, that I’ve heard of, and now all of a sudden we can’t do it because it’ll offend people. What is one supposed to make of that? But I think there were a lot of things that were actually, in some strange way, predictive of what was actually going to happen later.’